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THE ORIGINS OF

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THE ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY
IN ROMAN EGYPT

In this, the first thorough enquiry into the
origins of alchemy in Roman Egypt,
Jack Lindsay covers the crafc techniques
and mystery lore of metallurgy i in¬
dustries of the ancient world, allied
industries such as dyeing and mining etc.,
myth and speculation surrounding creation
and the nature of the universe, the giu wth of
interest in magnetism, the development in
systems of physics among the Stoics, which
have reappeared in modern times, and the
growth of gnostic and hermetic cults of
contact with the spirit-world.

Lindsay describes how all these ele¬
ments came together as a part of the
general culture development of Graeco-
Roman society and how the impasse it
reached was linked with technological
failure and the inability of Greek thought
to develop beyond its geometrical basis
with allied maths and atomic mechanism.
The result is a welcome addition to
Lindsay’s Roman Egypt series which
breaks new ground and presents a valu¬
able survey of a fascinating subject.

MULLER

£5.00 net

SBN 584 10005 1

Jack Lindsay

THE ORIGINS
OF ALCHEMY IN
GRAECO-ROMAN
EGYPT

FREDERICK MULLER

First published in Great Britain 1970 by
Frederick Muller Ltd., Fleet Street, London, E.C.4

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of Frederick Muller Limited.

Printed in Great Britain by
Ebene^er Baylis and Son, Ltd.

The Trinity Press, Worcester, and London
Bound by Wm. Brendon & Son Ltd.

ISBN o 584 10005 1

Marie Delcourt-Curvers

This solid flesh a circling smoke
in winds of bellying Time
haunts crevices of Space and seems
anchored here or there:

Men have thought the prospect strange
demonic scaring as they woke
from a ravishing crystalline dream
of abstract Eternities
to touch the edges of Change
where all Numbers twist and break:

yet Pattern lurks in the vanishing lair

of ragged particles. Alchemists

first kept the double vision and reckoned

as aspects of a single Stream

the Vortices of spinning mist

and the Structure of the unseeable second

when Life leaps tipwards through the range

of fiery unstable Symmetries,

intricate dangerous Time.

Time

is the moving

image of Eternity
Plato remarked among the Stars.

Eternity

is the sudden

wholeness of Time
Apollo answers amid the Flowers.

Contents

Author’s Note

Page

xii

Greek Scientific Thought before Alchemy

Historical References

}

More Historical References

The Name Alchemy

Demokritos and Bolos of Mendes

9°

More on Zosimos

343

The Later Greek Alchemists

358

Conclusions

382

Notes

393

Bibliography

433

Index

441

Illustrations

I Page

r I Mithraic mosaic of the Seven Gates at Ostia 26

f t Mithras born from the rock. Mages on a relief at Daskylion,

i jth century b.c. 28

j The still of Demokritos; reconstruction of the mercury still
| of Dioskorides 3 5

!• 4 Relief of priest of Mithras 3-7

| J Ancient Egyptian goldsmith at crucible 46

p 6 Workshop of a moneyer at Rome 5 5

| 7 Smiths from the region of Laodikeia 62

I I Lakonian relief from Chrysapha, about 5 50-30 b.c. 75

|N 9 Travelling merchants in China: three T’ang figurines show-

ing Semitic, Persian, and Western types 86

10 Chinese symbol of Yang-Yin: hermaphroditic, as the cock is
j, male, the snake female 89

^;t! Urt-hekau, the Cobra-goddess of magical spells 101

Cobra-goddesses of Lower and Upper Egypt 104

Relief of Campaspe riding Aristotle; Psyche ridden by
Aphrodite 115

}4 Gem of Mithras slaying the Bull, with Eros and Psyche on
1 the reverse (broken) 119

, I) Pompeian painting of the torture of Psyche 123

”, |6 Thoth in Ibis-form with Shu and Tefnut as lions 161

'* *7 The weighting of the heart of Osiris Ani 164-5

>; 18 Sekhait, Thoth, and Atum register a king’s name on the

Heavenly Tree placing the king within it 171

(I9 Herm in Dionysiac form with implements of worship 173

1m Ptah—as Guardian of one of the Arits of Osiris (Pap. of
K Ani); and as the Magician’s Lord 176

Al Mithraic cameo 180

’ Mummiform figure on staff with snakes; two crossed snakes
p*' from the Book of the Underworld 188

Combinations of signs to express modifications of gold 193
il4 The Sungod, with ram-head, sailing on the river of the
1 / Underworld 203

IpJ' Bartering a necklet for perfume 216

8|t6 Egyptian unguent-maker’s workshop 218

“l 7 Egyptians using a torsion-press 222

Incense-trees imported from Punt 224

ILLUSTRATIONS

29 Heaps and cones of incense 226

30 Cones of incense; Lady and Servant with Cones 229

31 Relief of Roman goldworker, aurifer 230

32 Egyptian lady using powder-puff 236

33 Pompeian painting of loves as chemists 239

34 The three-armed still of Maria the Jewess 244

35 Reconstruction of the three-armed still 247

36 Stages in the evolution of the still 250

37 Kerotakis or Reflux Apparatus, as shown in a Greek MS 252

3 8 Reconstruction of Kerotakis (M =Metals; P =Palette) 2 5 5

39 Ouroboros: St Mark’s MS 299 fi88v 260

40 Ouroboros: Paris MS 2327 fi96 263

41 Ouroboros: St Mark’s MS 299 fi88v 266

42 Ouroboros: Paris MS 2225 f82, stylised version 266

43 Two figures of Aion 271

44 The Consort of the Sky-goddess in his circular form 273

45 Relief of Aion 276

46 The still 280

47 Sky-goddess with consort; Shu supporting her, aided by

two ram-headed figures 286

48 Sky-goddess bent over to encircle, in double form, her back-

bending circular husband 287

49 The Cat killing the Serpent at the Foot of the Heavenly Tree 293

50 Serpent enfolds ithyphallic Osiris 298

51 Osiris breaks out 3 00

52 Chnoumis gems 3°5

53 The Sungod of Night surrounded by the Five-headed

Serpent of Many faces; on his head the Beetle of Khepri, the
rising sun of the next day 308

54 Gem with Chnoumis above an altar and inscription, on

reverse “I ever I am the Good Spirit.” 311

5 3 Osiris enthroned on the Mound with snakes 314

56 Silver from Samara with encircling griffin 316

57 Serpent-enclosed ithyphallic Osiris 321

3 8 Serpent containing the Four Cardinal Points 3 24

59 The cold still of Zosimos 329

60 Cosmic serpent enclosing Hermopolis 334

61 Cosmic Serpent, two-headed 339

62 Ouroboros on a magical gem (with inscription

IAO ABRASAX) 34 *

63 Seven Forms of Osiris, serpent-enclosed 346

64 Egyptian Barber and Customer 348

6) Egyptian Lady using Lipstick 331

ILLUSTRATIONS

66 Scorpion-goddess Serquet in her serpent-boat propelled by

a crocodile 337

67 Later alchemic imagery: the Green Lion devouring the Sun

(from The Rosary of Philosophers) 363

68 The Alchemical Assumption (from The Rosary) 368

69 The alchemical death of the Hermaphrodite (from The

Rosary) 376

70 The Winged Hermaphrodite symbolising the Red Stone

(from The Rosary) 379

71 Alchemical Resurrection (from The Rosary) 388

Author’s Note

This is the fourth book of a series on the life and culture of
Roman Egypt. It is, however, complete in itself, though naturally
the more one knows of the period the more one is aware of its
ways of thought and action, what it comes out of and what it is
moving towards, and the richer becomes the background against
which one views any particular aspect. The first book dealt with
the more ordinary matters of daly life; the second with “leisure
and pleasure” and the Dionysiac cult in its later phases; the third
with the life on the Nile and the role of that river in Egyptian
religion and world-outlook. Here I deal with the theory and
practice of alchemy in its earlier centuries, its formative period.
Egypt is centre of the picture, but to comprehend all the ideas and
images flowing in to that centre we need to look also to the general
trends in Greek scientific and philosophic thinking, and to the
potent influences generated in the Iranian world of the Mazdean
and Magian fire-cults.

Especially in the earlier phases the picture is involved and
complex; but for this very reason the inquiry into what happened
is in many ways all the more interesting. For we find an extremely
rich and subtle merging of ideas and practices from a wide field
to beget a new science, a new deep-going set of values and atti¬
tudes. With strange insight the Greeks intuited and sketched out
systems of scientific thought which they were not able to explore
with exact methods. Their atomist hypotheses are well-known;
recently Sambursky has shown how the Stoics grasped the con¬
cept of fields of force, of continuous forces, of a cohesive and
tensional continuum. I trust I have in turn shown how, amid
much fantasy and confusion, the alchemists were not only the
founders of experimental science, but also were struggling with
ideas that belong to the future of science rather than its past.

J. L.

Greek Scientific Thought before Alchemy

If, as this book tries to show, the emergence of alchemy marked a
deep crisis in ancient thought and science, a crisis which could not
be resolved from within the given framework and its precon¬
ceptions, then it is clearly necessary to begin with a discussion of
what was achieved in the Classical and Hellenistic periods, and
what were the limitations of that achievement, what were the
boundaries that it was found so difficult to cross. But Greek
philosophy and science of the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., with
their roots in the 6th and 7th centuries, are very rich and complex;
ind attempts to set them out in brief succinct definitions are liable
to end by giving a very imperfect and devitalised effect of what
actually happened. Still, the problem cannot be evaded. We must
try to generalise on various aspects of the development, concen¬
trating on the main issues that were raised and their relevance for
the alchemic revolt.

We begin then with the 7th century, with the growth of
Ionian thought which sought in various ways to explain the
universe by finding its fundamental principles and substances (or
lubstance), and by concentrating on natural phenomena; and the
Pythagorean school of South Italy, which had the same end in
view, but sought the explanation of reality in Number, in an
abstract principle. As two important expressions of these opposing
viewpoints in the 5 th century we may take the atomic theory of
Leukippos and Demokritos, which saw all bodies as composed of
ultimate and indivisible elements or atoms moving in an empty
(pace; and the hypothesis of the universe’s construction by the
Pythagorean Philolaos, who argued for a central condensed fire
and an outer fire surrounding the spherical universe, which itself
was divided into three spheres, Olympos (that of the fixed stars)
Cosmos (with the planets, sun, moon,) and Ouranos (the sublunar
region in which is the earth and a theoretical anti-earth, Asitichtbori).

ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 3

Philolaos also defined the elements in terms of geometrical
figures: earth was made up by the cube, fire by the tetrahedron,
air by the octahedron, water by the icosahedron, while a fifth
element, which comprehended the others and was the bond of
them all, was represented by the dodekahedron.

The Ionian thinkers had raised the question of what the universe
was composed of, what single underlying substance—water or air
or fire or some indefinable primary element, the apeiron (that with¬
out bounds or limits) of Anaximadros. Empedokles of Akragas in
Sicily devised a theory of the elements working in a system of
opposites, love and strife, attraction and repulsion; earth, water,
fire, air floated in these two enclosing media which acted as
material forces. At first there had been an harmonious spherical
whole enveloped in Love, with strife extending on the outside.
Strife absorbed the four elements, drove out Love, and created
Chaos; but Love reasserted its power with a revolving motion;
and in the central region, little affected by the universal rotation,
the world was rebuilt. Air escaped first, but compressed by the
limits of the universe it was changed into a hollow crystalline
sphere; fire accumulated in one half of the sphere, making it
luminous, while the other half remained dark—hence our earth,
at the centre, sees the alternation of day and night. (Argument has
gone on as to whether Empedokles saw the present world as
belonging to the period of disorganisation by strife or to that of
love-integration. 1 ) Herakleitos had defined all things as moved by
the unity and conflict of opposites; Empedokles sought to carry
this sort of outlook into a detailed application of the struggles
between the two conflicting forces, with Necessity as the sum of
their activity, together with the “contract” that ties them to¬
gether as they build and destroy—each of them limited by the
effects of the other.

Thus, Love brings forth at first partial assemblages with what it finds
available at every point, and these assemblages undergo natural
selection by virtue of Strife, which thus cooperates from the other side
in creation; Love shapes forms out of drives caused by Strife, but also
reabsorbs all varieties in the end, while later Strife sharpens, increases,
articulates the variety brought forth by Love, yet to a destructive end.
The forces remain constant in behaviour, but the fearful intricacies of
their interaction give the effect of chance. The pattern of this interac¬
tion weaves together the obvious “intentionality”, or shall we say
functionality, seen in the order of life with the mechanical causality

which ensures the over-all pulsation. Everywhere elements of matter
and elements of function, of purpose and no-purpose, so to speak, are
locked together in the universal mellay of process. (G. de Santillana) 2

The emphasis put by Herakleitos and Empedokles on opposites or
contraries continues in Greek thought, and is the source of both
its greatest strengths and its greatest weaknesses. Aristotle, who
makes the principle an insistent feature of his physics, declares
l hat the theme was shared by Greek rational physics from the
outset. 3 Indeed it could hardly have been otherwise; for in this
matter the Greeks were carrying on the deepest and most perva¬
sive element in primitive tribal thinking, where the dual organi¬
sation of society is reflected in every aspect of the way in which
l lie universe and natural phenomena are regarded. 4

The main bases of Greek thinking have thus been laid: (i) the
idea of a unitary process in nature, of some ultimate substance out
1 >f which all things are built up, (2) the idea of a conflict of opposites
which are held together by the overriding unity, as the force
driving the universe onwards, (3) the idea of a definite structure in
l lie ultimate components of matter, whether this structure is
expressed by varying aggregates of atoms ( atomon , indivisible
unit) or by combinations of a set of basic geometrical forms at
1 lie atomic level. The two first positions were derived from the
forms of thought created over very long periods by tribal
society as it grew aware of its unity with, and its difference from,
nature. The third idea was the product of a society in which
individualism with all its small local conflicts, endlessly splitting
up the general interest, had been born—above all, a society in
which money-systems and mathematics had arrived as the expres¬
sion of the new divisive forces inside the overriding unity, the
xirongly surviving tribal elements.

The whole of classical thinking was determined by the forms
in which the problems of man and nature were thus presented.
Action, movement, and change could be recognised and con¬
sidered only under the categories devised out of general ideas of
the unity of process and the conflict of opposites within that
unity; but the thinkers were quite unable to arrive at concepts of
causality in the sense of that term in the post-Galilean epoch.
They could not fuse in any effective way the idea of the unity and
conflict of opposites with that of the atomic substratum of reality.
'I'Iicy saw the individual as a summation of a simple whole, as

4 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 5

embodying the unity of society, not that unity together with its
inner conflicts which linked him with the other individuals in a
complex situation of agreement and dissent, likeness and unlike¬
ness, union and opposition. They had carried too directly and
uncritically a tribal concept or image into a society divided by
all sorts of discords, conflicts, divisions of class, property, and
power. The individual (person or object) was seen as a sort of
largescale atom, complete in himself or itself. Men did not inquire
how each individual acted on another and affected him, or how
objects impacted in motion; they thus avoided all problems of
mechanical causation and the many connected matters. Instead,
they asked what the nature of substance or identity was, and what
were the links between the forms taken by substance. Relations
thus became of extreme importance—but relations regarded under
the aspect of the powers or capacities of action residing inside the subject.
“Relations were assumed to have the status of attributes
securely anchored in the independently existing substance”
(Cornford). 5 Aristotle indeed has much to say of causes , but what
he considers under this term is form and matter —that is, the
internal constituents into which a total thing can be analysed.
He sees three kinds of change: locomotion, or the movement
from one place to another; growth or diminution, a change in
quantity; alteration, a change in quality. So all changes are
defined and explained in terms of the likeness or unlikeness of
the things undergoing changes. We get comparisons of this sort,
but not any precise computation defining the mechanics or dyna¬
mics of one object acting on another. Demokritos evolved his
idea of atomic aggregations on the basis of like to like :

All animals alike herd together with their own kind: doves with doves
and cranes with cranes. And so it is with inanimate things, as you may
see in the case of grains shaken in a sieve or the pebbles on the shore.
The whirling motions of the sieve arranges the grains in distinct groups,
lentils with lentils, barley with barley, wheat with wheat; and the
motion of the waves rolls all the longshaped pebbles into one place, all
the round ones into another, showing that the likeness of things tends
to draw them together. 6

And Leukippos remarked that the atoms, circling in the cosmic
eddy, were “separated apart, like to like”. Clearly the principle
is drawn from some deep emotional need or predisposition, not
from observation. If Demokritos had really watched the pebbles
being rolled about on the beach, he would have noted the role

of weight and size, rather than likeness in form, in determining
I he distribution. These examples might be indefinitely added to

10 bring out the overwhelming predisposition of the Greek mind
to find and apply the principle of “like to like”. The Hippokratean
1 reatise On the Constitution of Children accounts for the growth of
various parts of the body from the seed on the principle of like
to like: dense to dense, rare to rare, and so on. “Each thing
moves into its proper place according to its own affinity.” 7 The
I lermetic work Aphrodite deals with the question why children
look like their parents. The likeness is assumed; there is no ques-
iion of glancing at children themselves and asking if they do in
fact resemble the parents—as often they do not.

When nutritive blood turns into a foam [? secretion] and the genital
organs have provided seed, there is exhaled so to speak from the
members of the whole body a certain substance, under the action of a
divine force, as if it were the same man being born, and the same

1 1 keness results in the case of the woman. When the exhalation from the
male dominates and remains intact, the babe is born resembling the
l.idler, just as, if the conditions are reversed, it will similarly resemble
die mother. 8

The ancients were thus primarily interested in qualities : what
was like or unlike in various objects. Quantities such as weight
seemed unimportant. In cosmic terms they saw the merging or
separation of substances or elements with qualitative aspects such
as hotness and coldness, wetness and dryness—or, when they
dealt with atoms, similarities or differences in shape. Therefore
die notions of heaviness or lightness were subsidiary, invoked
only incidentally in describing the behaviour of like attracted to
like or unlike repelled from unlike. Plato carried on the Empedo-
k lean principle by which the scattered oddments of each element
were always seen as rejoining the main mass. Weighing appears
as a sort of violence done to the nature of substances:

When we weigh earthy substances, we forcibly lift them into an unlike
region [air] against their natural tendency, and they cling to their own
kind. But the lesser bulk is more easily constrained than the greater
and moves more quickly into the unlike region. Hence we have come
to call such a bulk light and the region to which we constrain it up,
and to call the opposites heavy and down. ... So these determinatives
must be variable and relative. . .. The passage of each body towards the
kindred-aggregate gives the name heavy to the moving body and down
to the direction of the movement.

6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Aristotle similarly refused to allow heaviness or lightness to be
regarded as primary properties or powers of nature; they merely
derived, he thought, from the tendency of simple bodies to make
for their own proper region—earth to earth, air to air, and so on.
So he lacked the basis for even beginning to work out any laws
of movement, let alone a theory of gravitation. Things were
moved by the attraction of likeness, not for any reasons of weight
or mass. A free-falling body was seen as only one more example
of the desire or need of unformed matter (potentiality) to reach
the actuality of its form, as in the case of a seed becoming a fruit¬
bearing tree. Only when a body has reached its “natural place”
at rest has it attained the completion of its form (lightness or
heaviness). 9

In Greek physics weight was thus the innate force of a body
producing its natural motion towards its natural place at the
centre of the earth; and the weight of a body was often compared
to the human soul. Just as a man was considered to move and act
by virtue of his soul (i.e. his form or eidos), so a heavy body moved
downwards by virtue of its weight, which also was nothing other
than its eidos.

So much for movement in space. As for changes in size, which
are of great significance with regard to processes of nutrition
and growth in organic bodies, Empedokles, Anaxagoras, and
Plato all again invoked the cosmic principle of like calling to
like. “All the tissues,” says Plato, “as they are irrigated with the
blood, repair what they have lost by evacuation. The character
of this depletion and restoration is the same as that of the move¬
ment of the universe, where all things go towards their own
kind.” 10 Again, as for alteration in quality, Demokritos held
that “agent and patient must be the same or alike; for if different
things act on one another, it is only accidentally by virtue of some
identical property.” Aristotle said only Demokritos insisted that
like alone could act on like, but elsewhere he saw the same prin¬
ciple in Empedokles’ doctrine of perception; and Theophrastos
attributed it also to Diogenes of Apollonia. 11 Here indeed most
thinkers took the opposing view: that unlikes affected one another,
e.g. the heat of fire warmed cold hands. But they were all agreed
in looking for qualities which affected other qualities.

In early theories of knowledge the like-affects-like formula was
widely accepted. “The physical philosophers,” says Sextus, “have
a doctrine of high antiquity that like things are capable of know-

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY J

mg one another.” 12 Empedokles declared, “By earth we see earth,
by water water,” and so on. When attempts were made to explain
perception by the passage of effluvia or exhalations from an object
to the affected sense-organs, this outlook was given a new force.

I ike was considered to move to like. Theophrastos adds a further
reason: “It is natural for all living creatures to recognise creatures
oft heir own kind.” In later antiquity, partly through the influence
of Stoicism, which we shall soon examine, the idea of magical con¬
cordances and harmonies of force or influence entangling the
whole universe in one vast and infinitely complicated network
was general. Thus the Neoplatonist Plotinos says:

Mow are magical practices to be explained? By sympathy, by the
existence of a concordance of like things and a contrariety of unlike
things, and by a diversity of many operative powers in the one living
universe. Without any external contrivance, there is much drawing and
n pell-binding. The true magic is the Love and Strife in the universe. In
magical practices men turn all this to their own uses. 13

11 c uses the same terms, Pbilia and Neikos, as did Empedokles
nearly 700 years earlier.

I have stressed the fact that certain preoccupations born from
1 he social situation, from the whole way of life of the Greeks,
held them up from breaking through into new fundamental
positions. It was not any exhaustion of mathematics itself that
. uused the hold-up, as is often stated. With the least change in
social pressures, there was a continual ferment of ideas and
methods, which seem for a moment as if the leap into new posi¬
tions is about to take place. An inability to conceptualise (to
grasp as a general factor free for application in new ways) the
i.tlc-of-change of the rate-of-change is what separates Archimedes
I rum Newton by a barrier that the former could never cross.

Purely mathematically, there is nothing in Newton’s Principia that was
not familiar to Archimedes, except the notion of the rate of change of a
velocity. And even here, only the notion was alien to Archimedes, and
not the power for formalising the notion mathematically, if by some
reversal of history it had come within his purview. In fact, purely
mathematically Archimedes was much better equipped for dealing
with it formally than was Newton, seeing that Newton did not manage
lo define really rigorously the notions of velocity and acceleration to
(lie very end of his days. (Bochner) 14

()ne characteristic of Greek society in almost all fields was the
i urrying-over of tribal ideas and methods of organisation, though

8 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

the rapid development of the system kept lifting these ideas and
methods on to new levels, with new centres and applications.
Hence, as I have argued, the confusion induced by attributing
to the new “atomic individual” with all his great powers of
initiative (and also of discord and violent self-assertion) the
simple refraction of the social whole which had been substantially
true in far-back days of tribal brotherhood and equality. A key-
aspect of the divisions introduced into society, denying the simple
refraction, was the advent of the cash-nexus, of money-values
continually disrupting old relationships and balances; another
was the growth of slavery in all sorts of new forms outside its
primitive aspect of chettel-slavery. The slave was the obvious
example of a man reduced to a thing, the complete reflection of
the cash-nexus with its “thingification” of relationships. The
existence of large numbers of slaves, on whom was concentrated
the burden of manual labour, meant that the slave (a thing, not
a man) represented the mechanistic principle of his society. The
use of a man-machine had obvious limits in comparison with the
machine proper; but the latter, with its necessary mathematical and
other scientific bases, could only develop in a society that felt
the pressures urgently making for productive advances, yet could
not put the burden simply on the man-machine. Hence the way
in which the 17th century initiated the forms of modern science
making possible the largescale invention and application of all
sorts of machine-extensions of the human frame. Slavery as it
existed in the Graeco-Roman world created a social and psycho¬
logical barrier to the development of mechanics and dynamics in
the post-Galilean sense. Not that we must think of it as a sort of
external system unfortunately imposed on its societies. In the
last resort it proceeded, not out of any purely economic motiva¬
tion or need, but out of the total human situation, which in turn
it affected and modified. The concept of the “atomic individual”
as the free man (with all its virtues of liberating men from ancient
constraints) had as its reverse side the concept of the man-thing
or man-mechanism; the new sense of freedom was dogged all
the time by an increasing sense of fate or necessity. Hence the
dilemma of Greek thought, which on the one hand was richly
aware of the patterns of change and on the other hand could not
advance from dialectical generalisations to applications in
mechanics and dynamics.

The only quantitative formula which Aristotle attempted

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 9

assumed a proportionality, not between force and acceleration,
hut between force and velocity. This was equivalent to saying,
incorrectly, that the force is equal to the product of load and
velocity—as against Newton’s second law, in which acceleration
l ikes the place of velocity. That is, Aristotle, like every other
ancient thinker, was quite blank as to the existence of friction
as an opposing force to be considered when defining relations
between forces as causes-of-motion and the motions that in fact
resulted. (The sole exception was Themistios in the later 4th
century a.d., who remarked, “Generally it is easier to further
1 lie motion of a moving body than to move a body at rest.”)
Aristotle, considering men at work hauling a ship over land,
saw as the only two factors the weight of the boat and the
hauling powers of the men. These two factors were imagined
;is existing in a sort of vacuum, with all other factors (friction)
eliminated. The notion of the men as abstract things or machines
inhibited the thinker from approaching the situation concretely
.mil discovering the actual laws of mechanics. 15

It is perhaps not going too far if we link the Greek refusal to
. (insider the mathematical forms that would have led to mechanics
of the Galilean type (or the phenomena that led to the mathema-
1 it s), with the hatred of the dominant thinkers for any form of
equality. Ploutarch in a discussion on Plato’s statement (authentic
or apocryphal) that “God is always busy geometrising”, makes
one of his speakers remark:

I''or the Equality aimed at by the many [arithmetical equality] is the
greatest of all injustices, and God has removed it out of the world as
being unattainable. But he protects and maintains the distribution of
things according to merit, determining it geometrically, that is, in
accordance with proportion and law. 16

I lence the liking for geometrical systems, such as we find in
I’hilolaos and Plato, where one set can be considered superior to
another. Certainly Plato and Aristotle held strong views that the

I I i stribution of things to persons of unequal merit was unequal. The
linking of social and intellectual positions in this relation is not so
odd as may seem at first sight when we recollect how much the
Pythagoreans’ concepts of “proportion and law” were deter¬
mined or stimulated by their political struggle as a middle force
against both aristocrats and plebeians. Once such a bias had been
established, a bias that was powerfully in accord with the emo-
lional outlook of the main thinkers of the classical period, it

IO ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

became almost too deeply rooted to be questioned. To estimate
its strength we must again link it with the whole psychological
and intellectual complex set up by the existence of slavery. In
defending the rejection of juridical equality by the Roman
system, Cicero attacked as unequal that kind of equality which
“does not recognise grades of dignity”. 17 Such an attitude, per¬
vading all the spheres of thought and emotion, was a second-
nature for the dominant class and its spokesmen, and affected the
whole of society, limiting even the attempts at revolt.

The Greeks developed mathematics incomparably beyond the level
reached by the previous most talented practitioners, the Baby¬
lonians; but despite all the new ground they broke, the
limitations of outlook sketched above laid down in the last
resort the extent to which development here too was possible.
Because of the concentration on the isolated object and its
qualities, its form, geometry played a key part in the scientific
approach and in defining the limits of mathematical expansion.
In the detailed development over the centuries the results were
highly complex; for there was every now and then a strong
chafing against the barriers, momentary flashes of deeper insight,
or the promise of methods that would in fact break through,
above all by the Stoics and then by Neoplatonists of later andquity.
But always the barriers rose up again and prevented any effective
application of the new ideas. The sort of dilemma that kept coming
up may be illustrated from a paradox set out by Demokritos:

If a cone were cut by a plane parallel to the base, what must we think
of the surface of the sections? Are they equal or unequal? For if
unequal, they will make the cone irregular, as have many indentations,
like steps, and unevennesses; but if they are equal, the sections will be
equal, and the cone will appear to have the property of the cylinder and
to be made up of equal, not unequal circles, which is quite absurd. 18

His problem could not be met within the static concepts of atomic
lengths, i.e. of constant magnitudes, however small those magni¬
tudes were conceived. The instrument for solving the query
could only be provided by the dynamic concept of the lim i tin g
process and the other notions of the infinitesimal calculus. The
Stoic Chrysippos did evolve a conception of the limiting process
that made possible a deeper grasp of the nature of infin ite
sequences of inscribed and circumscribed figures, which Greek
mathematicians cautiously evaded when using methods of exhaus-

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY II

lion. But the sort of breakthrough that came with Galileo and
Newton did not happen, and could not happen, in a world where
i here were so many assumptions and methods based in the older
(lassical positions.

Astronomy was the field where the method was fully mathemati¬
cal. Other branches of research acquired varying degrees of
mathematical expression. Aristotle knew already a science of
()ptics subordinate to geometry and Harmonics subordinate to
arithmetic, not to mention a Mechanics subordinate to three-
dimensional geometry; and remarks of his show that the Pythago¬
reans visualised some sort of mathematising of physics. 19 But
litis was never brought about. Archimedes’ laws on the balancing
of the lever and on floating bodies pertain to mathematical
physics and were the first of their kind, but they did not bring
about any further movement in the same direction. 20 He and his
followers arrived in some covert and unexplained way at the con¬
cept of the statical moment, but they left the concept untouched
and unquestioned in their formulations. It was not conceptualised

that is, conciously grasped in its implications—till the 17th
century. In the same way the Greek could not form a notion of the
relation of relation, the property of properties, the aggregate of
aggregates. Aristotle even polemised sharply against the possibility
(>f a motion of motion. 21 Archimedes lacked coordinate systems
or mathematical functions; still in On Spirals he came close in his
own way to forming the derivative of a function:

jy_ = # (!) ;

dx dx

which is the mathematical prerequirement for the “abstract” concep-
lualisation of the notion of velocity. However, in order to advance to
l he concept of acceleration, one has to be able to form a second
derivative. This requires that one form the derivative (1) at each and
every point x, then view the resulting mathematical object as a new
function in x, and then apply the “abstract” process of differentiation
lo this new function again. It is this kind of interation of logico-ontolo-
gical abstractions to which Greek thinking was never able to penetrate
lo any noticeable extent (Bochner). 22

But we do not want to go into detailed mathematics here. We are
concerned with the general points; and what has been said above
will suffice to bring out on the one hand the limitations imposed
on Greek scientific thinking by certain deep preconceptions.

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY IJ

12 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

ultimately social in origin, and on the other hand the way in
which they chafed against the limitations at various times but
could not break through and establish new basic positions from
which to advance in new directions.

How far late antiquity was able to devise a programme of
theoretical physics without being able to put it into action can
be gauged from a passage in Iamblichos (who died about a.d.
330):

Sometimes it is also the practise of mathematical science to attack
perceptible things with mathematical methods, such as the problem
of the four elements, with geometry or arithmetic or with the methods
of harmony, and similarly other problems. And as mathematics is prior
to nature, it constricts its laws as derived from prior causes.

This it does in several ways: either by abstraction, which means
stripping the form involved in matter from the consideration of matter;
or by unification, which means by introducing mathematical concepts
into the physical objects and joining them together; or by completion,
which means by adding the missing part to the corporeal forms which
are not complete and thus making them complete; or by representation,
which means looking at the equal and symmetrical things among the
changing objects from the viewpoint whence they can be best compared
with mathematical forms; or by participation, which means considering
how concepts in other things participate in a certain way in the pure
concepts; or by giving significance, which means by becoming aware of a
faint trace of a mathematical form taking shape in the realm of percept¬
ible objects; or by division, which means considering the one and
indivisible mathematical form as divided and plurified among individual
things; or by comparison, which means looking at the pure forms of
mathematics and those of perceptible objects and comparing them;
or by causal approach from prior things, which means positing mathema¬
tical things as causes and examining together how the objects of the
perceptible world arose from them.

In this manner, I believe, we can mathematically attack everything in
nature and in the world of change. 23

For our purpose the most important work by Plato was the
Timaios in which he set out his cosmogony, his scheme of physics.
He draws a bold and complex picture of the creation of the
universe by the demiurge (a word he took from Philolaos). He
makes no reference to Demokritos, probably through contempt
for mechanistic systems; yet he draws from him the assumption
that the phenomena known to our senses are rooted in discrete
invisible elements, whose aggregates and interactions cause or

underlie all physical occurrence. However grudgingly, his theory
in an atomic one. From the Pythagoreans however he takes the
a'(sumption that Number forms the basis of all physical events.

I Ic holds that there are certain symmetries in the structure of
lu.itier, so that the correct approach is one of three-dimensional
gr( imetry. Not that he sees simple systems of order. In his universe
there is a deep and ceaseles struggle of the uniform and the non-
uniform, the ordered and the disordered, which we can best
describe as a stuggle of the symmetrical and asymmetrical
aspects of structure. He himself uses these terms:

All that is good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not without measure.

. . . Of symmetries we distinguish and reason about those that are
•.mall, but of the most important and the greatest we have no rational
comprehension. With respect to health and disease, virtue and vice
there is no symmetry or lack of symmetry greater than that which
exists between the soul itself and the body itself. 24

Asymmetry or non-uniform combinations and structure bring
about instability and change. Speaking of Fire he writes:

Now the liquid kind, in so far as it partakes of those small water-
particles which are unequal, is mobile both in itself and by external
lorcc resulting from its non-uniformity and the shape of its figuration

I I lie idea of its schema ]. But the other kind, composed of large uniform
particles, is more stable than the first, and is heavy, being solidified by
its uniformity; but when fire enters and dissolves it, this causes it to
abandon its uniformity; and when this is lost, it partakes more largely
1 >1 motion. And when it has become mobile, it is pushed by the adjacent
air and extended upon the earth. For each modification [pathos] it has
received a descriptive term: Melting and Fluidity for its extension over
1 lie earth. 25

I ''or the four elements he followed Philolaos in taking four perfect
bodies, omitting the fifth one for which he had no use. He made
1 lie same correlations as Philolaos. Wanting to explain transitions
from liquid to gaseous states and back again, he needed common
Icatures in all or some of the four elements in order to show how
one could change into another. The first three figures were all
bounded by equilateral triangles, which permitted the establish¬
ment of relations between them; the cube was however bounded
I iy squares so that it could not be resolved into such triangles by
further division. So there was no transition from earth to fire, air,
or water. Still, Plato did not take the equilateral triangle or

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 15

14 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

square as his basic structural unit; instead he divided all his
elements into rectangular triangles. The advantage of the break¬
down into small structural units was that sets of equilateral
triangles or squares of varying and increasing sizes could be
constructed, to represent the series of elementary bodies of
different sizes. Plato was also thus able to differentiate between
various kinds of fire (including light) and so on. But within each
series the tetrahedron was the smallest body, being made up of
the least number of triangles; it thus provided two of fire’s
characteristics: mobility (smallness) and penetrability (sharpness
of the solid angle). Demokritos had had to suppose that two
separate properties were owned by fire: smallness and sphericity;
Plato reduced them to a single basis.

We are not sure how much detail he borrowed from Philolaos;
but in general we may say that he first worked out a scheme of
interlocked structures in matter which permitted the change of one
element into another. He may then be claimed as the founder of
alchemy as a science, even if it was to take some time before the
implications were worked out. He saw metals as the product of
fusible water (not to be identified with ordinary water).

Of all the kinds of water we have termed fusible, the densest is produced
from the finest and most uniform particles: this is a kind of unique
form, tinged with a glittering yellow hue, even that most precious of
possessions, Gold , which has been strained through stones and solidified.
And the offshoot of Gold, very hard because of its density and black
in colour, is called adamas [perhaps haematite or platinum].

And the kind that closely resembles gold in its particles but has more
forms than one, and in density is more dense than gold, and partakes
of small and fine portions of earth (so that it hardens), while it is also
lighter because of the large interstices within it, this particular kind
of solid waters, being thus compounded, is termed Bronze. And the
portion of earth that it is mixed with becomes distinct by itself, when
both grow old and separate again from each other; and then it is
named Rust [ios ]. 26

There is a strong suggestion of the possibility of the transmuta¬
tion of metals with special reference to gold. “Now imagine a man
modelling all possible figures out of gold and then proceeding
without stop to remodel each of these into every other, if some¬
one were to point to one of the figures and ask what it is, by far
the safest answer in point of truth would be that it is gold.” Only
“the substratum which receives all bodies” is stable and constant. 27

Wc may note too the important role of fire, which suggests
metallurgical process as does the very term “fusible water”.

As the fire, on issuing from the water, does not pass into a void but
presses on the adjacent air, this in turn compresses the liquid mass which
1*1 Mill mobile into the abodes of fire and combines it with itself; and the
mass, thus compressed and again regaining its uniformity, through
1 lie departure of the fire, the author of its non-uniformity, returns to

I lie state of self-identity [symmetry]. And this cessation of fire is termed
< 'onling, and the combination that follows on its departure Solidification . 2S

II is important to note that the essential ideas of cosmic creation or
natural process are all drawn from human crafts and industries.

I'he term for the creator (or fundamental creative activity) is

dcmiourgos, craftsman. Like all ancient thinkers (and many others
besides), Plato assumes that any form of purposive movement or
significant development implies a prior act of decision carried out
1 iy a person; he cannot rise to the concept of purpose as born out of

I lie totality of a situation with its inner formative process, even

II lough he himself has shown how development could occur
ill rough the symmetry-asymmetry principle. His demiurge works
by a paradeigma or pattern, a term used by Herodotos for an
nrchitect’s model or plan of a building, or for samples, e.g. of
mummies made of wood. The term is also used for a sculptor’s or
painter’s model. Plato himself uses the metaphor of modelling, as

III the passage cited about gold and elsewhere: “When the
generating Father perceived it [the cosmos] in motion and alive,
in agalma [honour, statue in honour of the gods], he too rejoiced,
and, well pleased, designed to make it resemble its paradeigma yet
more closely.” 29 He also draws on the techniques of perfume¬
making. Substance is voided of all forms “just as with all fragrant
ointment men bring about the condition by craft, techne, to make
the odours as odourless as possible; and all who set out to mould
figures in any soft materials wholly refuse to allow any previous
figure to remain visible in it, and begin by making it as smooth as
possible before they carry out their work.” 30 He also uses the
analogy of winnowing with a sieve to explain how the particles
separate and fly about, the dissimilar driven apart, the similar
drawing together. 31 In a play on words he brings out how the
lerm apeiros suggests the unskilled as well as the unlimited or
chaotic: that is, it represents the world before craft-skill (forma¬
tive process) gets to work on it. 32

Besides the principle of symmetry-asymmetry as the source of

l6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

movement and development. Plato also uses his triadic formula.

It is not possible for two things to be joined together without a
third.” On the principle of like-to-like he states that the triadic
nature of the soul (its fusion of Identity, Otherness, and Essence)
is reflected in the structure of the universe. He puts the point in an
idealist way, turning the abstractions into substances and giving
them as plastic material to the demiurge to make souls out of; but
the notion of a triadic movement both in the soul and in nature,
making a dialectical unity of all process, is nonetheless present. 33

We now come to two aspects of Aristotle’s thought that concern
us: the way in which he developed the scheme of elements able to
move round or be combined in various ways, and his definition of
metals and stones. He supposed the ultimate basis to be a primitive
matter or prima materia, which had only potential existence till
impressed by form. Form was not only the geometrical structure
but also the total inner organisation of a thing; it was the sum of
its qualities and properties, and gave it its identity. In its simplest
manifestation it turned the primal matter into the four elements,
fire, air, water, earth, through a variation of qualities arising from
heat and cold, fluidity and dryness. Each element had two of
these qualities and no more. But the opposites, heat and cold,
dryness and fluidity, could not be mated. So the four possible sets
of combinations were: hot and dry (fire), hot and fluid (air), cold
and fluid (water), cold and dry (earth). In every element one quality
dominated: dryness in earth, coldness in water, fluidity in air,
heat in fire. Through the medium of shared qualities one element
could pass into another, e.g. fire into air through the heat they
shared, and so on. Two elements could pass together into a third,
through each discarding one quality, as long as the effect was not
to leave two identical or two contrary qualities. Thus, air and
earth, by dropping fluidity and cold, could produce fire (heat and
dryness). Aristotle taught that what was changed was only the
form; the underlying matter was always the same. 34

Plato definitely bases his system of changes in matter on varia¬
tions and combinations of geometrical structures, which are
capable of mathematical definition. Aristotle appears to assume
varying arithmetical combinations of the different elements, plus
similar sorts of variation inside an element; but he gives no clue,
for example, as to how an element discards one of its qualities,
e.g. how air drops its fluidity and earth its coldness so that the two

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 17

of them may produce fire. Neither are we given any idea how the
proportions work out in any precise way in substances:

11 icy contain earth because every simple body is specially and most
abundantly in its own place. And they all contain water because the
11 impound must possess a definite outline and water alone of the simple
I ii itlies is readily adaptable in shape. Moreover earth has no power of
n ihcsion without the moist. On the contrary the moist is what holds it
together. It would fall to pieces if the moist were completely eliminated

I torn it.

They contain earth and water then for the reasons given; and they

II intain air and fire because these are contrary to earth and water—
earth being contrary to air and water to fire, in so far as one substance
< an be contrary to another. Now all compounds presuppose in their
omiing-to-be constituents which are contrary to one another; and in all
compounds there is contained one set of the contrasted extremes, i.e.
cold-dry [earth] and cold-fluid [water]. Hence the other set [hot-fluid,
air, and hot-dry, fire] must be contained in them also, so that every
compound will include all the simple bodies. 35

S< i deep-rooted is the concept of any body as involving a union of
opposites that Aristotle assumes it in his exposition. He imagines

I he cosmos as made up of 59 concentric spheres, with the earth at

II ic centre, water making up the next sphere, then air, then fire—

1 1 lough with no hard boundary-lines. Each element has a natural
tendency to move to its own place. The union of contraries
prevents what he has called “excesses”. If earth gathers in excess,
it will destroy the intermovements among the elements which
create reality and its diversity of objects; and so on with each
clement. In fact then we find an enormous number of distinct
compounds, though any one of them will be changed into any
other if we alter the relative proportions of the composing
elements in the required direction.

As for metals they are born of exhalations. Vaporous exhala¬
tion is moist and cold, produced when the sun’s rays fall on water;
the smoky is hot and dry, produced by the rays falling on dry
land. In actuality the two vapours mix in varying degrees. The
heat of the dry one causes minerals, stones that cannot be melted
such as realgar (arsenious sulphide), ochre and ruddle (clayey iron
oxides), and sulphur. The heat of the moist one causes metals,
which are fusible or malleable, such as iron, copper, gold. Though
metals and minerals like all things contain something of all four
elements, water and air (chiefly water) predominate in metals, and

l8 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

earth and fire (chiefly earth) in minerals. 36 (The alchemists identi¬
fied the dry vapour with sulphur, the moist with mercury, and
developed the theory that all metals were made up of mercury and
sulphur.) Aristotle distinguished chemical combination, mixis, and
mechanical mixture, synthesis', the mixis of liquids had its own term,
krasis. However his notion of chemical combination (as in drugs)
was unclear. He thought it a kind of mutual assimilation if the
components managed to form a homogeneous whole, and so was
led to insist that a weak component was merely absorbed by a
stronger one without working out any ratios for such a situation
to develop. 37

Exhalation is compressed (i.e. condensed) by the dryness of the
rocks, and congealed or solidified, apparently by cold. The admix¬
ture of dry exhalation however prevents the metal from reverting
to water. All metals are thus affected by fire and contain earth,
since they all contain the dry exhalation. Only gold is unaffected
by fire. The exposure to fire makes metal produce dross and
change colour; Olympiodoros adds that for the same reason they
rust. The presence of earthy matter thus explains the difference
between the baser and more precious metals. Gold, with the least
amount of dry exhalation, is at one end of the scale, and iron, with
the largest amount, at the other. Aristotle did not make this point,
but it was duly noted by the alchemists. 38

Theophrastos in On Stones worked these positions out further.
Stones and (mined) earths are made of earth as metals of water.
The earth becomes a pure and uniform matter as the result of a
conflux, when it is a lump, or of filtering, when it is in veins, or of
some other process of separation. This uniform matter, subjected
to heat or cold, undergoes solidification and forms the stones or
mined earths. At what stage is colour thought to be brought in?
At the stage of making matter uniform or that of solidification?
Presumably at either or both. But there seems an idea that only
solidificadon by heat will beget a change in colour at the final
stage of formation; for the change of yellow ochre into red gets
the comment, “Fire would appear to be the agent responsible
for all these transformations.” In the Timaios Plato had taken
colour to be a fire itself, which owns particles “so proportioned
to the visual stream as to produce sensation”. Colour effects are
brought about by the differing sizes of the particles, which dilate
or contract the visual stream. 39 There was a strong fire-element
also in Aristotle’s smoky exhalation, “the most inflammable of

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 19

substances”, and “potentially like fire”. He admits that it was
ni iinething hard for us to envisage, but in some of its states it was
liny and in others not unlike a gas. Hence, once thinkers took an
in 1 ivc relation to natural processes and wanted to repeat them in a
l.iboratory, it was natural they should turn to fire, to fusion and
ilislillation, in the attempt to change one metal into another. 40

There was already indeed a clear idea that art ( techie , which
embraced any sort of craft-activity, including scientific expriment)
was a way of learning to understand and control process by
reproducing it under man-made conditions. Thus Theophrastos

I emarks, in connection with one of the colour-discoveries which
jduyed an important part in developing the alchemic idea:

II ere [a spot above Ephesos where alone cinnabar was manufactured] a
Hand which glows like the scarlet kermes-berries is collected and
thoroughly pounded to a very fine powder in stone vessels. It is then
washed in copper vessels and the sediment is taken, pounded and
washed again. There is a knack in doing this, for from an equal amount
of material some workers secure a great amount of cinnabar, and
others little or none. However, use is made of the washings that float
above, especially as a wallpaint. The sediment which forms below
t urns out to be cinnabar, while all that is above, which is the great part,
is merely washings.

The process is said to have been invented and studied by Kallias an
Athenian from the silvermines, who collected and studied the sand,
thinking it contained gold owing to its glowing appearance. But when
he found it contained no gold, he still admired its fine colour and so
came to discover the process, which is by no means an old one, but
dates back some 50 years before the Archonship of Praxiboulos at
Athens.

From these examples it is clear that techne imitates nature, physis, and
yet produces its own peculiar substances, some for utility, some
merely for their appearance like wallpaint, and some for both purposes,
like quicksilver—for even this has its uses. It is made by pounding
cinnabar with vinegar in a copper mortar with a copper pestle. And
perhaps one might find several things of this kind. 41

We see then that both Plato and Aristotle played a leading part in
popularising the idea that matter was composed of elements which
could be changed into one another. The Aristotelean formulation
in particular became very widely known and accepted. Plato s
Timaios however received a new and deepened attention with the
rise of Alchemy, Gnosticism and Neoplatonic philosophy in
general.

20 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 21

There is one more important line of thought which we must
glance at before we turn to alchemy itself: that of the Stoics.
Stoic philosophy was the great creation which came up to sustain
men’s minds after the breakdown of the city-state and of the
philosophic forms derived from the way of life there. The free
expansion of thought and art which had occurred in archaic and
classical Greek cannot be separated from the successful building-
up of the city-states, their elimination of the kingship and
the heavy hieratic culture which had everywhere accompanied the
growth of kingly state-forms. But now, after Alexander the
Great, the kingship had been imposed after all. The imposition
occurred, however, on a culture which had been developed in the
city-state’s days; and the result was therefore complex. The
Stoics on the whole expressed the positive side of the new
situation, doing their best to get rid of what I have called the
atomic individual or object. However, under ancient conditions,
the isolation of the individual in his specific form, his qualities and
attributes considered as a sort of self-generated entity, could not be
overcome. The Stoic in one sense was more than ever driven back
into himself, needing to work out an ethic of self-sufficiency,
endurance, and apatheicr, but in his struggle against isolation he
produced a new conception of the unity of process and of the
interrelation of objects or beings inside it.

The key-concept was enclosed in the term pneuma (breath, often
a synonym for air), defining the pervasive substratum in a
cohesive universe, which, unlike Aristotle’s, was surrounded by a
void. For Aristotle, coherence, sjntecheia, involved the notion of
continuity in a geometrical or contiguous sense; the Stoics now
gave the term a sense of dynamic cohesion in the physical world.
The concept of pneuma had had a long history. Anaximenes, with
his notion of the universe evolved out of air by condensation and
rarefaction, declared, “As our soul, being air, holds us together,
so do breath and air surround the whole universe.” There was
also in pneuma an association of in-and-out movement, of breath¬
ing, a rhythmic participation in the life-process. For the Stoic?
pneuma was air and fire, active elements or forces of cold and heat;
they added the qualities of dry and moist in order to distinguish
between the pneuma of the soul and that of plants, physis. The
former pneuma was dry and warm; the latter moist and cold. 42

The familiar Stoic aphorism, “Nature is a technikon fire, going
on its way to creation,” stated emphatically the unity of craft-

method and natural process. Technikon means “working like art,
like craft”. Hippokrates had spoken of “innate heat”, and Galen
look this to be the cause of metabolism. The Stoic Kleanthes
declared, “This element of heat possesses in itself a vital force that
pervades the whole universe.” 43 Matter was seen as of two kinds,
hyle- like or passive, and pneuma -like or actively cohesive. Coher¬
ence was a positive force, sjnetike dynamic \ and pneuma-Xd&s. matter
was characterised by tension, tonos, an inner heat of fire. As
pneuma entered into organic and inorganic matter alike with its
admixture of air and fire, it pervaded the whole universe and made
11 a single inter-related unit drawn together by an endless series of
tensions. In the consistent linking of pneuma with tonos the Stoics
made their greatest and most characteristic contribution to
scientific thought. 44

Pneuma , as an active force, generated all the physical qualities of
matter. Thus

I lie Stoics generalised their continuum theory into a field theory; the
pneuma is the physical field which is the carrier of all specific properties
of material bodies, and cohesion as such thus gets a more specific
meaning by becoming hexis, the physical state of the body. The follow¬
ing quotation from Chrysippos’ On Physical States is very instructive:

“The physical states are nothing else but spirits, because the bodies
arc made cohesive by them. And the binding air is the cause for those
bound into such a state being imbued with a certain property which is
called hardness in iron, solidity in stone, brightness in silver.”

And a little later he continues, “Matter, being inert, by itself and
sluggish, is the substratum of the properties, which are pneumata and
air-like tensions giving definite form to those parts of matter in which
they reside.”

This gives some idea of the central position in the Stoic theory of
matter of hexis, which denotes the structure of inorganic matter in a
similar way to which physis expresses organic structure, and psyche the
structure of the living being. (Sambursky). 45

Inorganic entities were classified as discrete, contiguous and
unified. Discrete entities might be in disorder or in a certain kind
of order (like soldiers on parade); contiguous were conjoined,
like chain-links or stones in a wall; unified, like a stone or a metal
“ruled by a single state”. The co-existence of the elements in the
highest structure was sympatheia. A living body was a form of
unified structure: Galen describes the faculties of the human body
as structural elements of its physiology, extending throughout its
totality. 46

22 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

There are many more important aspects of Stoic physical
theory; but here we may add three more points. First, each soul
had an hegemonikon, a dominant part (generally considered the
heart). The hegemonikon centralised and coordinated impressions,
lifted them into consciousness, and set off the reacting impulses and
actions. Secondly, that there were four successive stages thought
to take place of increasing specification of an object, each stage
including those that had happened before it. These were substratum
(shapeless passive matter); quality (which the pervasive pneuma
imbued); state (the sum total of components, air and fire, in their
varying proportions); and relative (determining the relation
between the physical states of different bodies). It has been
pointed out how well these categories correspond to the methodo¬
logical scheme of Newtonian dynamics. Simplikios divided the
fourth stage into two kinds of relations: relative state (defined by
that of another thing outside the object) and relative , which referred
to things capable of change (e.g. bitter and sweet). Hexis was an
example of the relative , expressing the physical continuum that
covered an infinity of differing states, each of which could evolve
from the other by a continuous transition brought about through
“the change of the former quality”. Such a development involved
a series of changes in the pneumatic tensions permeating the body
in question. Thirdly, as we would expect from the notions of
pneuma, hexis, and tonos, the Stoics deepened the whole concept of
mixture. Fusion, as distinct from Aristotelean composition, they
saw as a total mixture, “Whereby,” as Plotinos, dissenting, said,
“there is no part of the mixed substance which does not participate
in the mixture as a whole.” In order to show their opposition to
Aristotle, Chrysippos stated, “There is nothing to prevent one drop
of wine from mixing with the whole sea,” and the Stoics were much
interested in cases of extreme dilution: gold finely suspended in cer¬
tain drugs or burnt frankincense rarefied in a vast volume of air. 47

The Platonic, Aristotelean, and Stoic ideas that we have here
outlined all played an important part in the development of
alchemic theory and practice as we shall see with the unfolding
story. The great period of Stoic physics was the 4th and 3rd
centuries b.c., when alchemy was gradually coming to a head, if
we are right in dating its founder, Bolos, around 200 b.c.; and
Stoic ideas certainly did a great deal in making the work of Bolos
possible. The next five hundredyears saw the maturing of alchemy;
they also saw the development of Neoplatonism as the dominant

GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY 23

philosophy of late antiquity. Alchemy and Neoplatonism shared
many characteristics. What Neoplatonism stood for will emerge
.r. our story goes on. Here it will suffice to say that in certain
essential respects it represented an attempt to reassert the Platonic
idea of hierarchical levels of being inside the organic pantheist
Sioic universe. The Platonic system, partly modified and changed
I >y l he transposition, took on new complexities and richnesses as a
result. But in seeking thus to define the existence of qualitative
levels inside the unitary cosmos, the Neoplatonists were driven
back to transcendental notions of deity, denying the pantheist
materialism of the early Stoics. The ancient world always saw
hierarchy or development as coming down by stages from above,
not as a movement from below upwards. At most the upward-
movement was conceivable as a return along the tracks laid down
by descending spirit or deity. Thus Neoplatonism was agitated
I >y an inner tension between the notions of unity and of hierarchy,
of organic and continuous forces or processes and of a pattern
imposed from above by a Monad outside the universe.

(inosticism and the Hermetic creeds shared with it a belief in
I lie descent of life or spirit through different levels or stages down

10 the earthly level. They sought to find the way aloft again, not
merely by philosophical reasoning, but by a gnosis, a knowledge
that was the gift of revelation. As part of the Stoic heritage,
together with the vast amount of folklore and magical recipes
\v I tich were given a fresh force in the light of Stoic concepts, these
1 reeds, like Neoplatonism itself, had a profound sense of the

11 implex interrelationships and correspondences inside the organic
or vital (pneumatic) whole—while at the same time they suffered
I mm an intense sense of loss, of an agonising division that cut
ncross the face of life. It was precisely, indeed, the dialectic of
these two opposed positions which gave such strength and
hiscination to the period’s dreams, fantasies, deep insights,

< 1 imprehensions. Alchemy was richly a part of this world, torn
by many of the same contradictions, but with a secure difference.
Alone it clung, despite confusions and ambiguities, both to the
belief in varying levels and structures, and to the Stoic position
1 bat the psyche was material, that there was a mutual penetration

< if soul and body, of physis and the world of plants, of hexis and
1 be world of inorganic matter. It consistently saw all the more
solid or specific elements as permeated and held together in the
infinite network of pneumatic tensions. 48

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

Historical References

One way of getting at the difficult and elusive problem of the
origin of alchemy is to search for certain or probable references to
alchemic ideas and practices in the centuries before the art comes
out into the open. We need not expect direct references to be
frequent, as the alchemists lived an underground kind of existence.
Still, with the extreme difficulty of dating their first definite
activities and the lack of any clear manuscript tradition, the quest
for signs of those activities in the broader fields of culture is the
only sure way of anchoring them in history. What then are we to
seek for? First, any suggestion of the transmutation of metals.
But, beyond that, any unmistakable signs of a chemical outlook
emerging, of a view of reality which looks to chemical processes
rather than to geometrical structures or arithmetical combina¬
tions and proportions for the understanding of matter and cosmic
systems. This line of approach also has the value that it brings us
concretely into the cultural situation out of which alchemy was
born and which it played an important part in gradually changing.

First, there is a suggestive turn of phrase in a fragment from the
poet Kratinos, who belongs to Attic Old Comedy: “What [in the
town] seems golden becomes lead again in the country.” 1 This
passage does not prove the existence of alchemical ideas, but it
implies some sort of belief in a possible transformation of lead into
gold and gold into lead—in a hierarchical system of metals with
gold at the top and lead at the bottom. The notion that gold had
some special life-giving power was of course very ancient and
extremely widespread; and the gleam of gold early suggested
sunlight. Pindar links gold coins with the sun. Especially in
Egypt the concept of divinisation involved a transformation of
the body into precious stones or metals. In the tale of King
Kheops and the Magicians, the pious kings of the 5 th Dynasty are
born with gold stamps that reveal and express their power:

The child slipped forth on to her hands, a child of one cubit with
strong bones; the royal titulary on his limbs was of gold and his head-
rloth of true lapis lazuli. They washed him, cut his navelstring, and laid
him on a sheet on a brick. And Mesekhent [birthgoddess] drew near to
him and said: “A king that will exercise the kingship in the entire land.”
And Khnum gave health to his body. 2

The royal children are imagined as inlaid bronze figures. From
Mesopotamia we have a bronze figurine of a kneeling worshipper
who makes an offering for Hammurabi; the hands, face, and beard,
though not the hair, are plated with gold, while the left wrist
bears a golden bracelet, the right one a bracelet of bronze. It
seems that the man is supposed to have washed his face in water
I mm the lustral stoup projecting from the base; and the purified
parts of his body are shown as gold—in some sense they have
I >ccn transformed, approximated to the divine. 3

That the Greeks held the same sort of ideas in this respect as
1 lie Egyptians and Mesopotamians is shown by a passage in the
< hlyssej:

Then Athene, Zeus’ Daughter, made him taller to see and stronger,
and down from his head she make the locks flow in curls like the curls
of the hyacinth-flower. And as when a man overlays silver with gold, a
craftsmen, wellskilled, whom Hephaistos and Pallas Athene have
l aught all manner of craft, and whose work, as he turns it out, is full of
.1 grace, so the goddess shed grace on his head and his shoulders . . .

The charts shed by the goddess on Odysseus is a divinising
power, and is seen as a gold-and-silver transformation. Alkman,
describing a Spartan blonde, says there is a bloom as of gold on
her hair, then goes on to tell of her silver face. Flere there is a hint
of divinisation, deliberately muted. The idea of the gods as gold¬
bodied is shown by the story of Pythagoras exhibiting his golden
l high in a theatre, and the way in which Alexandros of Abono-
leichos, anxious to show himself as of the same lineage, equipped
himself with a similar limb. When the gods supplied Pelops with
a new shoulder, the spare part was of ivory; they could lend him
only their own substances. 4

The long-held idea of gold as a divinising, and to some extent
transforming, substance does not in any way prove the existence
of alchemy, but is certainly a necessary precondition. We come
( loser however when we meet schemes of history-periods linked
with metals in a graded series; for here the grading assumes some

2 7

zG ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

sort of hierarchy. Hesiod saw history as divided into the ages of
gold, silver, bronze, heroes, and iron (the present dispensation).
We may compare the Vision in Daniel-.

You, O king, saw, and behold a great image. This great image, whose
brightness was excellent, stood before you; and the form of it was
terrible. This image’s head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of
silver, his belly and his thighs of brass. His legs of iron, his feet part of
iron and part of clay.

You saw till that a stone was cut without hands, which smote the
image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake these to pieces.
Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to
pieces together, and became like chaff of the summer threshing-floors;
and the wind carried them away, so that no place was found for them;
and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain and filled
the whole earth. 6

Here the four metals represent the four ages that are to be brought
to an end by the advent of the Kingdom of God, the rule of the
righteous. There is clearly a stong Iranian influence. At the start of
the Rahman-Yasht Zoroaster in a dream (or in two dreams) sees a
tree whose metallic branches are explained by Ahura Mazda as
representing the successive reigns of Persian kings. 6 The
Magousaioi of Asia Minor, who combined Mazdean doctrines
with Chaldean astrology, taught that the life of the world was
divided into seven millennia, each under a planet and bearing the
name of an associated metal. For six millenia the God of Good and
the Spirit of Evil fought over the earth, till the Spirit established
his domination and spread calamities all round. Zeus (Ahura-
Mazda) decided to send Apollo (Mithras), a solar god, who would

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

kill off the wicked with a torrent of fire, resurrect the dead, and
establish a reign of justice and felicity. The Seventh Millennium,
i hat of the Sun, would assure a happy Age of Gold. At its end the
Sun-power too was ended, and all the domination of the planets;
l lie Eighth Millennium brought about a general conflagration in
which Fire took in and resolved the other Three Elements. Earth
was renovated, all corruptibility gone. 7

The link of ages and metals had penetrated also into Egypt. In a
manuscript dated 2nd century b.c. we find the tale of a son of the
king, Neneferkaptah, who persists in seeking the writings hidden
i n a nekropolis of Memphis as well as the stelai (stone-slabs) of the
I louse of Life. One day, as he takes part in a procession in honour
of Ptah, he meets an old priest who reveals the place where
I both has secreted a book written in his own hand, which can tell
I iow to master Fleaven, Earth, Underworld, Mountains and Sea.
The prince makes the journey needed for exhuming the book
buried in seven coffers closed one inside the other—boxes made of
gold, silver, ebony, ivory, another wood, bronze, and finally iron,
l ie then has to fight a fantastic dragon. In this myth of initiation
we meet the four metals of the Hesiodic ages combined with ivory,
ebony, and another wood, to make up the planetary seven. 8

The aphorism by Kratinos, with which we began, has a pro¬
verbial ring about it and so would seem earlier than the poet
himself. In its light we may consider another proverbial turn of
phrase, this time in Plato’s Republic. A speaker asks impatiently,
“Do you suppose we’ve come here to smelt gold and not expressly
10 hear discussion [logoi] ?” That Plato did not invent the phrase,
but was using a common idiom, is proved by its reappearance in
1 he mouth of the orator Deinarchos, who declares in depreciation
of someone, “He learned under the instruction of Aischines to
smelt gold, not to do or suffer what was set before him.” The idea
of gold-smelting as something chimerical and fruitless is odd.
Chrysocheein cannot mean “go prospecting for gold”; it means
“carry on the craft of goldsmith”, and chrjsochoeion is a goldsmith’s
workshop, not a mine in any sense. The idea of goldsmelting as a
fantastic occupation may have arisen from the smith sometimes
taking for gold a substance that proved to be of base metal; but
that it should have begotten a proverb suggests wider implica-
I ions. The story told in the Souida to explain the saying is clearly a
later rationalisation. The Athenian populace were said to have
deserted all their usual work and rushed off to Mt Hymettos

28 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

where a heap of gold-dust had been found. The heap however
was guarded by warlike ants. The populace, returning home,
mocked at one another, “So you thought you’d go gold-smelting!”
This tale, though failing to explain the origin of the phrase,
stresses the fact that there was indeed a strong association of hare¬
brained schemes with goldsmiths. 9

It is possible that fragmentary aspects of Mazdean thought
filtered through to the Greeks long before the full systems were
known. In any event we may suggest that the graded scheme of
ages and metals presupposes some sort of link between the metals
and cycles of the heavenly bodies. The first proof however that the
outlook suggested by Kratinos’ gold-lead antithesis had become
connected with metallurgical or chemical experiment is to be
found in the Materia Medica of Dioskorides, who, a native of
Kilikia, seems to have flourished in the first half of the ist century
a.d., studying at Alexandreia and Tarsos, and serving as an army-
surgeon. He described the roasting of stibnite to get the pharma-
ceutically-important white oxide of antimony; and like Plinius after
him, he warned the practitioners not to carry the reaction too far
lest the product “turn to lead”. He also remarked, “Some record that

2 . Mithras born from the rock, holding in his hand the grape which in
the West replaced the haoma of the Persians; Mages on a relief at
Daskylion, 5 th century b.c.

HISTORICAL REFERENCES 29

mercury is a constituent part of metals.” 10 Both natural and manu-
i.u tured mercury were known to the Greeks and Romans; and
Dioskorides described its production by distillation from cinna-
har-ore. Plinius called it as “the eternal liquid, poison of all
tilings”. The early Greek name, hjdrargyros , meant silverwater;
the Latin term, argentum vivum , meant living-silver. 11 Dioskorides
w i th his catalogue of some 600 useful plants was well known to the
alchemists; we find extracts from his work following alchemic
recipes. Here then we seem definitely on the alchemic trail. 12

I ’linius gives us the first record of an actual alchemic experiment.
"I lope drew on the Princeps Gaius, who was most avid for gold,
to order a great weight of aiiripigmentum , orpiment, to be cooked
| excoqui]. The result was certainly excellent gold, but of small
weight, so that he suffered loss.” An operation such as cupellation
was used to extract gold from metallic sulphurs which suggested
gold by their colouring; there was as yet no clear distinction
I ictween the extraction of already-existent gold and the fabrication
1 >f gold from other materials. 13

There is a striking alchemic image in the Pumpkinification of
Claudius, written soon after that emperor’s death, probably by
Seneca. The poet is describing the Fates at work:

Threads managed with a lucky hand change colour
as there they twist. The Sisters gaze in wonder:
the cheap wool is changed to precious metal
and the Age of Gold descends on the lovely thread.

I lere colour-changes, in textile dyeing, suddenly bring about a
metal transformation; the movement up the colour-scale drives
1 lie whole process upwards so that gold is produced; and this
transformation spreads out into the entire world. The poet is
thinking of works like Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, where Nature
lakes over the work of dyeing and puts in its place a spontaneous
odour-enrichment expressive of the Golden Age in which the
sources of corruption, trade and luxury, have been eliminated and
man is one with natural process; but instead of the redemption
I icing simply the result of some Saviour’s advent, it is here ex¬
plained in terms of dyes and colour-changes in industrial process
(spinning thread). The Saviour is indeed present; he is the young
Nero ascending the throne; but the way in which the Golden Age
is inaugurated is decisively different from the way in the Eclogue.

Manilius, the astronomical poet, refers to the alchemic process

30 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

of diplosis, doubling, of a quantity of precious metal. He is dealing
with Capricorn and the sign’s connection with Fire:

Hence you influence arts and study. Whatever fire needs
for its uses, demanding new flames for its works,
under you is to be assessed.

To seek out the hidden metals
and buried riches, calcine the veins of earth,
double matter with a sure hand by art,
whatever is fabricated of silver or gold,
what iron and bronze the burning smithies smelt \solvant\
and the hearths of Ceres perfect, rise up your gifts —

Hence too the mobility of things, and the changed mind
often wavers. 14

Note the link of mobilitas and change, mutata mens , with a liquid
metaphor {natat , swims, wavers). A passage from the anonymous
Aetna is also worth citing, not because it directly reflects alchemic
methods, but because of the way in which it merges human and
metallurgical processes. The earth is seen as being tortured like a
man on the rack who is forced to tell his secrets:

The seed of silver is sought, then a vein of gold.

Bits of earth are flame-tortured and iron-tamed

till they ransom themselves at a price. With the secret blabbed,

they are silenced and left to beggary and contempt. 15

As we shall see, the alchemists looked on their processes in just
the same way as a sort of torturing, killing, and resurrecting of
the life of matter. There is further perhaps a touch of alchemic
thinking in the connection of gold with fermentation in a phrase
from the Satyricon of Petronius: “She put a hundred gold pieces,
aurei, into my hand. That was the leaven,/ -;rmen turn , of my fortune,
peculium .” The gold is seen as doubling, increasing the money he
owns. The old image of interest or profit as tokos, increase of
progency, yields to a chemical idiom. 16

From Plinius, Columella, and Seneca we gain strong indications
that already a body of alchemic works had gathered round the
names of Demokritos and the mage Ostanes. In Columella, a
writer on agriculture, Demokritos appears as a prominent
magician. He is cited with Mago and Virgil for the generation
of bees from bullocks’ carcasses, and is called a great sage who
like Pythagoras was learned in the nature of the universe. 11
We shall discuss later the relation of the magician Demokritos

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

3 1

to the atomic philosopher writing under that name; for the
moment we are concerned with his emergence in works of date-
able authors. Columella writes:

Ocmokritos in his book On Antipathies declares that these little vermin
| caterpillars] are killed if a menstruating woman walks thrice round each
bed with hair loose and feet bare. After that all the litde worms fall to
earth and thus die. 18

I dsewhere, however, he brings out the fact that “Demokritos”
is often an Egyptian writer, Bolos of Mendes:

The celebrated writer of the Egyptian race, whose Commentaries, called
( '.heirokmeta in Greek, are published under the pseudonym of Demokri-
los, is of opinion that as a precaution against the disease [erysipelas] the
sheep-hides could be often and carefully examined, so that if any trace
(>f the disease is by chance found in any of them, we may at once dig a
l rench on the sheepfold’s threshold, lay the afflicted beast on its back,
inter it alive, then let the whole flock pass over the buried body. Thus
(lie disease is driven away. 19

I lore we meet a passage-rite used to express or bring about the
change from one condition or level of life to another; the disease
is left behind as the other sheep are ritually reborn out of its
dead body.

Plinius tells us that Demokritos was instructed in magic by
Ostanes, and repeats that he was connected with the mages—
(hough Solinus states that in his discussions he argued against
them. Plinius adds that he violated the tomb of Dardanos to get
magic books buried there, and himself composed magic books. 20
Seneca, contradicting the statement by Poseidonios that Demo¬
kritos invented the Arch, remarks, “It seems to have slipped your
memory that this same Demokritos discovered how ivory could
be softened and by boiling a pebble could be transformed
\converteretur\ into an emerald: the same process used even today
for colouring stones amenable to this treatment.” Plinius also
speaks of works that taught the art of tinting artificial emeralds
and other brilliant stones. 21 Whether the reference is to Demo¬
kritos proper or to Bolos is uncertain; and it is possible that
works which Seneca and Plinius read as mere recipes of faking
had a hidden alchemic meaning. What is clear is that the works of
Bolos, whom we may take to be the founder of Graeco-Roman
alchemy, were now quite familiar. Bolos (as Demokritos) is later

32 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

cited by Ailianos for the belief that lions did not sleep: “Demo-
kritos says that alone of living beasts the lion is born with wide-
open eyes.” This notion was linked with that of the Lion as a
symbol of the Sun. 22

There was much activity of astrologers in the ist century a.d.
at Rome and elsewhere; and there seem many links between
astrology and alchemy by this time. Tacitus mentions a Pammenes
(the name is Egyptian) famed for the Art of the Chaldeans, who
was expelled from Rome; there was also an alchemist Pammenes,
described as the teacher of Demokritos in the art of goldmaking.
George Synkellos, in a passage on Demokritos, says that Pam¬
menes was blamed for expressing himself directly, not symboli¬
cally. He may have been the Egyptian Phimenas of Sais, to
whom a recipe of Leyden Papyrus is attributed. 23 The astrologer
Petosiris appears in Plinius, and Juvenal says of the superstitious
woman: “She wants to drive to the first milestone, consults her
book for the right hour. If her rubbed eye itches, she looks at
her horoscope ere she takes a salve. If ill abed, she thinks the
hour correct for food that Petosiris prescribed.” 24 There was a
genuine astrologer of this name, cited by Manethos, Porphyrios,
Ptolemaios, Yettius Valens, and Firmicus; the last calls him
“a most just ruler of the Egyptians and a very good astronomer”.
He and Nechepso, probably living in the 2nd century b.c., seem
to represent an Egyptian system of astrology as distinct from
that of the Chaldeans. 25 In an apocalypse he is described as hear¬
ing a Divine Voice that reveals to him the truth about the stars. 26
Plinius says that a theory handed down by Petosiris and Nechepso
is still extant, called “the Theory of Numbers”:

For it divides up the Zodiac into groups of three signs. This theory
shows it possible to attain 124 years of life in the region of Italy. These
thinkers declared that nobody exceeds the ascendant measure of 90°
(what is called Rising) and stated that the period itself may be cut short
by the encounter of maleficient stars or even their rays, and by those of
the sun. 27

In alchemical MSS we meet a 'Letter from Petosiris to King
Nechepso as well as an Organon (or Sphere ) of Petosiris for linking
a set of numerical calculations with the issue of maladies. There
is also Petesis, priest and magician, who is called a King of
Armenia. Petasios is named as the author of Demokritean

Memoranda ; and the mage Ostanes addresses him. Petesis (Greek
Isidoros) means Gift-of-Isis; both the Greek and the Egyptian
forms of the name appear at the head of the MS of St Mark. 28
A treatise by Olympiodoros, is addressed to Petasios King of
A rmenia and mentions Petasios the Philosopher as if he were a
different person. Zosimos mentions a Petesis as an alchemical
contemporary of Hermes; and citations show him a follower of
Maria’s school. 29

All this entanglement does not get us far. Both Petesis and
Petosiris (Gift-of-Osiris) were common names; Petosiris appears
as early as Aristophanes as a typical Egyptian. We can however
infer a general connection of astrology and alchemy. 30 The for¬
mula, “Nature rejoices in nature, nature conquers nature, nature
dominates nature,” fundamental in alchemical theory, is to be
found in Firmicus, where it may be taken as part of the Petosiris-
Ncchepso corpus: “One nature conquers another nature . . .”
This summation of theory is certainly at least Hellenistic in its
origin. It has been taken as a form of Stoic thought; and a
scholiast tells us it was used by a “very ancient [Latin] poet”,
who may have been Ennius. For Ennius seems to have been
acquainted with Pythagoreanism, another possible source of the
phrase or at least a system congenial towards the thinking it
reveals. 31

For the later ist and early 2nd century we have a passage from
Lpiktetos the Stoic (a.d. 50-130): “The power of the true staff
< >f Hermes lies in the fact that it changes all that it touched into
gold.” 32 He is thinking of the true philosophy (i.e. Stoicism), but
his metaphor shows that he is aware of alchemic claims to
transmute metals into gold—and even more important, that these
claims are associated with Hermes (Mercury). He may be thinking
of Hermes as the great revealer of alchemy among other things,
or of mercury the substance, or of both; but in any case his phrase
is most striking and suggestive. We may also cite a passage from
Ploutarch, in which he speaks of colour as a dye cast by light. He
is discussing the moon and remarks:

Whereas here below shady places in the neighbourhood of lakes and
rivers, catching the sun, are dyed and made brilliant in robes of purple,
yes, even of scarlet, and give forth many varied images of colour through
the reflection of the light, what wonder is it if the vast flood of shadow,
falling as it were into a celestial ocean of light, not stable nor at rest, but
agitated by stars infinite in number and receiving mixtures and changes

34 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

of all kind, should extract different colours at different times and give
them out from the moon. A star or a fire would not in the shadow show
itself black or glaucous or darkblue, but over mountains or plains or
sea, many variations of colour from the sun come and go; and he casts
the lustre of the dye, tempered with shadows and mists as with the hues
of the painter’s palette .. .

We can say that men did not look on nature in these terms—
seeing mixtures and changes and a series of transformative dyes
—before something of an alchemic climate of thought had
developed. Ploutarch was also aware of the existence of processes
to make materials appear golden. He speaks of (bronze or brass)
vessels that “imitate the glow and the glittering of gold”, and
calls them “imitation gold” and “counterfeit metal”. Such an
attitude to alchemic processes is what we would expect from
someone who knows of them only from the outside and lacks
the clues which the practitioners kept secret or misleading in
their recipes. Ploutarch further had learned of the association of
the seven planets and the seven vowels found in Chaldean
teachings, as well as the connection of certain letters and
numbers. 33

There is also a suggestive passage in the so-called Meditations
of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in the mid-2nd century. He is in
one sense expressing the old Greek idea of the continual break¬
down of bodies into their component elements; but his terms
show the effect of Stoic theory together with something of an
alchemic idea of transformation. “There is to be seen in the things
of the world, not a bare succession, but an admirable corres¬
pondence and affinity. Let that of Herakleitos never be out of
your mind, that the death of earth is water, and the death of water
is air, and the death of air is fire, and so on the contrary.” 34

The astrologic link of planets and metals was fully stated by
Celsus in the Book of Truth against the Christians, in the later 2nd
century:

Those things are obscurely hinted at in the accounts of the Persians,
and especially in the Mysteries of Mithras, which are celebrated among
them. In the latter there is a representation of the two heavenly
revolutions: of the movement of the fixed stars and of that taking place
among the planets, and of the passage of the soul through them.

The representation is of the following nature. There is a ladder with
lofty gates, and on the top of it an eighth gate. The first gate consists of

HISTORICAL REFERENCES 35

lead, the second of tin, the third of copper, the fourth of iron, the fifth
i >f a mixture of metals, the sixth of silver, the seventh of gold.

The first gate they assign to Kronos, indicating by lead the slowness
of this star; the second to Aphrodite, comparing her to the splendour
and softness of tin; the third to Zeus, being firm and solid; the fourth to
I lermes, for both Hermes and iron are fit to endure all things, and are
moneymaking and laborious; the fifth to Ares because, being composed
of a mixture of metals, it is varied and unequal; the sixth, of silver, to
I lie Moon; the seventh of gold, to the Sun—thus imitating the colours
of the two latter. 35

j. The still of Demokritos and reconstruction of the mercury still of

Dioskorides

The soul in its ascent was thought to give back the qualities it
had absorbed at each stage of its descent. Thus each halt was a
sort of transmutation in terms of the relevant metal; after the
seventh change came the absorption into the luminous bliss of
i lie eighth sphere. Having come down from Ormuzd’s presence
by the low gate of the Crab, the soul went up by the lofty gate of
Capricorn. 36 This creed was popularised by Noumenios of Syria,
a thinker much esteemed by the Neoplationists and by Origen. 37

In the Mithraic Mysteries the ascent was expression by the
initiations into each of the seven stages, with rites, sacraments,
ordeals reflecting the tests and judgments of the soul after death,
beginning with the trial before Mithras. In the Mithraion of the
Seven Spheres at Ostia, seven gates were depicted in mosaic on
the central floor; in front of the reclining-benches were shown
the planets, and on the borders of the podia the signs of the
zodiac. In that of Felicissimus the symbols of seven grades
appeared in mosaic on seven floor-panels of the central aisle; on

ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

the eighth panel was a vase surrounded by twigs. In that of the
Seven Gateways at Ostia, straight behind the entrance, a black-
white mosaic of the central floor showed a large pinnacled gate¬
way flanked on each side by three smaller gates; and again the
seven planets were added . 38 Seven played a key-role in the rites.
The cultniche at Dura-Europos was reached by seven steps. A
crude relief (now at Mannheim) showed a big snake turned to a
vessel; by it a priest, probably a Father, made a libation in a
krater (mixing-bowl) on a small altar, with a dog, Mithras’
faithful companion at his side; a row of seven small altars were
also depicted. In Danubian reliefs seven cypresses (sun-trees)
were shown alternating with seven daggers, on each of which
hangs a Phrygian cap. A terra-sigillata bowl, on which appear
lion, vase with serpent, raven, and cock at the sacred meal,
seems to set out the four elements (water, vessel; fire, lion;
earth, snake; air, bird). The Persian mages revered the four
elements and took care not to pollute them . 39

The three Mithraic crypts found at Rome near the church of
Santa Prisca deserve a special word. The paintings on the long
side-walls give glimpses of the liturgic formulas accompanying
the rites. Each grade is once more represented by its tutelary
planet; and in one scene the six lower orders pay homage to the
seventh, that of the Fathers, using the formula: Noma Patribus.
Noma is an Iranian borrowing, so that the meaning is: “Glory
to the Fathers.” Another scene shows a procession of six lions,
while on the grotto’s left side we see the Feast of the Sun and
Mithras. Verses have been added on some of the lower levels.
Above the communion-scene the verses conclude: “Accept also
these Boughs, Holy Father, accept the Lions, through whom
we give incense, though we ourselves are consumed.” The
incense has been taken as meant to purify the air and chase demons
away; but it seems clear that Lion, Incense, Fire, Bough were all
linked, even identified. A holocaust with incense-burning sym¬
bolised the sacrifice and burning of the initiate; the offerer of the
sacrifice was also himself the victim, who died to be reborn. The
rite thus expressed a fire-transmutation, turning the initiate into
sun-gold . 40

We have noted the sevenfold division of time by the mages,
with each age owning a planet and a metal. Origen carried the
imagery into Christian thought, likening history to a ladder up
which men climbed. The first steps were in time and space, where

HISTORICAL REFERENCES 37

events lead up to the Mysteries and to the hidden meanings
accessible only to those who scale the towering heights.

Although to draw in material here from the Gnostic and Hermetic
systems is rather like trying to explain the obscure by the even
more obscure, it will perhaps be useful to point to the part played
by Hermes-Mercury in the soul-ascent. Hermes, the ancient soul-
guide into the underworld, was given a celestial role with the
swing of popular belief from the dark realm of Hades below the
earth as the site of the afterlife, to the bright spheres of the star-
world . 41 Ploutarch sees the Heavenly Hermes as the patron of
the Second Death, sjnoikos, contubernalis. On the tombstone of a
sailor at Massilia we read: “Among the Dead there are Two
Companies. One moves on earth, in aither the other goes, among
llie dance-groups, choroi, of the stars. The second is mine; for I
have gained a god as guide.” An epigram of the ist century a.d.
declares: “Wingfooted Hermes took your hand and led you on
high to Olympos and set you to shine among the stars of the
sky .” 42 The acquisition of Hermes as guide implied some sort of
mystery-initiation. In a Mithraic catacomb on the Appian Way
I lermes-Mercury leads the initiated before Hades and Persephone
(IMuto and Prosperpine). Here, though in the service of astral
religion, he reasserts his underworld-image; but he has to point
upwards. Under Egyptian influences the Sun in his Boat also
became the death-guide. Near the end of Julian’s satire on the
Caesars everyone is told to select his “guardian and leader”, and

4. Relief of priest of Mithras (now at Mannheim); row of seven small
altars and a huge snake turning its head to a big vessel by the altar where
the priest, possibly a Father, offers a libation in a krater, while the dog,

faithful companion of Mithras, sits at his side

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

38 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Julian is advised by Hermes to turn to the Sun: “Keep his com¬
mandment and thus procure yourself a cable and sure anchorage
in life, and when it is necessary to depart from this world, with
fair hope you’ll find him a leadergod propitious to yourself.” 43

An Hermetic tradition links crafts of metallurgy, dyeing, and
so on with the Fallen Angels. The Christian form appears in
Tertullian:

Those indeed who first devised these things are held to be damned and
sentenced to the penalty of death. For they were the angels who fell
from heaven upon the daughters of men and thus added fresh shame to
womankind. Certain substances well-hidden and many parts not well
revealed they then first brought out into the light for the benefit of an
age much less skilled than ours. They laid bare the working of metals,
they divulged the qualities of herbs, they made known the power of
incantations, they directed curious research even to the interpretation
of the stars.

But, as a special and as it were peculiar gift for women, they offered
them the instruments of female pride. They brought the flashing stones
that give to necklaces their varied hues, the golden bracelets claspt
about the arm, the artificial dyes that add colour to white wool, and
even the dark powder that enhances the effect of eyelids and eyelashes. 44

He asks sarcastically if it was God who showed men how to dye
wool with herb-juices and shellfish-spit. “He perhaps forgot when
bidding the universe come to birth, to order purple and scarlet
sheep?” The Fallen Angels were the ones who “betrayed the
secret ways of sin, delivered up gold, silver, and their works, and
among other things taught the art of dyeing fleeces”. He lists
among those who have had their arts revealed by these Angels,
“astrologers and haruspices and augurs and mages”. He merges
the Fall of the Angels with the Expulsions of the Astrologers or
Mathematici from Rome. “They are driven out like their angels.
The City and Italy are forbidden to the mathematici as heaven to
those angels, the same penalty falls on disciples and masters.”
(An odd identification of the imperial City with Heaven!)

Similar views appeared in Gnostic, Hermetic and Apocalytic
writings. In Gnosticism the virtue of moving from Ignorance to
Revealed Knowledge or gnosis is at times opposed to the sin of
turning instead to evil lores or forbidden gnosis that ties the
quester more tightly in the snares of flesh. The Universe Maiden
or Kore Kosmou, comments on the “meddling audacity” in the
restless movement of souls, and the same phrase is used of men.

"They seek what nature conceals in the depths of inaccessible
sanctuaries. They pursue reality up to the heights, avid to learn
by their observation what is the established order of celestial
movement.” 45

We meet here the theme of the search for hidden records of
divine lore, which we have already met in the tale of Nenefer-
kaptah and in the tradition that Demokritos violated the tomb of
1 )ardanos for magic books. Firmicus speaks of “whatever of the
divine the ancients brought forth from the Egyptian sanctuaries”,
and Loukian in a supposed account of an incarnation as Pythagoras:

In brief I was a sophist; for I must tell the truth, I take it. However, I
was not uneducated or unacquainted with the noblest sciences. I even
went to Egypt to study with the prophets, penetrated into their sanctu¬
aries, and learned the Books of Horos and Isis by heart. Then I sailed
away to Italy and worked on the folk in that quarter of the world so
well that they thought me a god. 46

The theme of the ancient book or stele is embedded in early
alchemic accounts; and we shall hear more of it. But some further
examples may be cited here. Euhemeros, the Hellenistic romancer
from Sicily, narrates how he found in the Red Sea, on the Isle of
Panchaia, a stele hidden deep in the temple of Zeus Triphylios;
on it were engraved the Deeds or Praxeis of Ouranos, Kronos,
and Zeus, by Zeus’ own hands. The aretologies of Isis from
Kyme, Andros and Ios, all announce their derivation from a
stele in the temple of Ptah-Hephaistos at Memphis; and Diodoros
gives the same origin for a stele he purports to cite from Nysa in
Arabia. 47 The author of the Axiochos, in the last century b.c.,
refers to a revelation of the mage Gobryes on the fate of souls;
the mage’s grandfather, after Xerxes’ expedition, had found two
inscribed bronze tablets at Delos, brought from the land of the
Hyperboreans. 48 To support his myth of souls in the moon,
Ploutarch cites ancient sacred parchments found at Carthage,
which “after the destruction of the first city, were secretly
carried off, and, without anyone knowing, were left a long time
in the earth”. 49 The Potter’s Oracle, after being dictated to the
sacred scribe, before the king and the priests, by the prophet in
a state of trance, is deposited (the account runs) at Amenophis
orders in the sacred archives of Heliopolis, where all may consult
it. 59

Astrologic manuscripts have similar tales. Sacred scribes of

40 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

perfect wisdom, pansophoi , under King Psammetichos wrote a
hmarium in hieratic script, which was deposited in the holy-of-
holies of the temple of Heliopolis and long after discovered. We
hear also of a Royal Book put into a ship, miraculously saved by
the gods, to reach the Trapezoutik Coast, wherever that may
have been . 51 The astronomer Ptolemaios falls back on a story of
an ancient roll, apparently to give prestige to his system:

Recently we have come on an Ancient Manuscript, much damaged,
which contains a natural and consistent explanation of the order and
number [in Egyptian nativities]; and at the same time the degrees
reported in these nativities were found to agree with the tabulation of
the ancients. The book was very lengthy in expression and excessive in
demonstration, and its damaged state made it hard to read, so that I
could barely gain an idea of its general purport. That too, in spite of the
help offered by the tabulation of the terms, better preserved because
they were placed at the end of the book. 52

The Kjranides, a kind of Hermetic Bestiary, also uses the fiction
of the sacred book. In the original prologue (preserved in a Latin
text that holds an earlier tradition than the Greek manuscripts)
we read: “This book was engraved in Syriac letters on a column
[or stele] of iron.” The more expanded account of Harpokration
runs thus:

I happened to encounter an old man very learned in foreign and Greek
literature. He called himself a Syrian, but he had been made captive and
remained there [at Seleukeia on the Tigris or a town nearby]. This old
man then made me go with him all round the town and he showed me
everything. Arriving at a spot some 4,000 [paces] distant from the town,
we saw, near a large tower, a column that the people of Syria [Assyria]
said had been brought and set there for the health and cure of the
townsfolk.

On scrutinising it closer, I saw that this colu mn bore an inscription
in strange letters. The old man, on being questioned, soon agreed to
explain the matter to me, and I listened to his account of the column as
well as the translation that he gladly made into the Aiolic [Greek]
tongue from the barbarian script.

“You see,” he said, “my son, the disposition of these three towers,
one which is 5,000 [paces] away, the other, 2,500, the third, 4,000. They
were built by the Giants when they wanted to mount to the heavens. It
was because of this impious folly that they were struck by lightning or
stricken with madness for the rest of their days by the Judgment of God
•—or else, God, in his wrath, threw them into the island of Crete.”

The old man, who showed me these matters, bade me measure with
a cord the height of the stone. I worked out then the nearest one and
found it 32 cubits high, 78 wide; it included a staircase of 208 steps. We
saw also the sacred enclosure, in the midst of which there was a temple
with a staircase of 365 steps in silver and another of 60 steps in gold.
Wc ascended them to offer up prayers to God, while the old man
revealed to me mysteries of the divine power that it isn’t fitting to re¬
tell.

As for me, despite my wish to know more, I set the rest aside for later
on, and inquired only about the column. The old man then, lifting up a
covering of byssos, showed me the inscription in foreign letters. As he
knew the language, I begged and implored him to explain the text,
without evasions or jealousy. Here then is what he read out from the
column. 53

“Without evasions or jealousy” is an Arab touch. From Al-
Razi on, the Arabs distinguished allegorising alchemy from the
practical side, and we find a pride being taken at times in setting
out plainly what has been left hidden. The author of The Aim of
the Sage states that he penetrated the secrets of the hieroglyphic
texts engraved on Egyptian temples so as to show that he was not
“envious” like the (Greek) ancients.

The Golden Compendium of Flaccus Africus, which declares
itself a compilation extracted from the Kjranides, tells the same sort
of tale as Harpokration, but substitutes tomb for sacred column
or stele :

Flaccus Africus, disciple of Belben, to Claudius of Athens the Calculator
(?), good continuation of studies and good success in research.

After the books of the ancient Kjranides, which are known to you
and which are attributed to your colleague Harpokration, I have dis¬
covered in the town of Troy, hidden in a Tomb with the bones of the
first king Kyranos, this little work entitled Compendium of Gold, because
it is a summary of extracts, made with care, from the more important
work of the Kjranides. hi -

Kyranos, though buried at Troy, is meant to be a Persian king.
Books were said to be found also in the tombs of Kleopatra,
Alexander, Hermes Trismegistos. According to the Arabs,
I lermes (the first one, living before the Flood) built the pyramids
to deposit in them all the secrets of knowledge before the world
was destroyed by cataclysm, by water and fire. Then he and

4 2 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Agathodaimon were later burled there as well. Belben, of whom
Flaccus calls himself disciple, seems the sage Apollonios of
Tyana, the Balinas of the Arabs.

Finally we may note in magical papyri:

Sacrifice of perfumes to Moon, of Claudianos. This very book,
property of the Dozen Gods, has been discovered at Aphroditopolis
[in Egypt], near the Very Great Goddess Aphrodite the Heavenly, who
embraces all the Universe.

[Prayer to Hermes] Your true name is inscribed on the sacred stele
of the adjton at Hermopolis, there where you were born . ..

Great is Lady Isis! Copy of the Sacred Book discovered in the
Archives of Hermes. It is the Method dealing with the 29 letters, thanks
to which Isis with Hermes found her brother and husband Osiris,
whom she was seeking. Invoke Helios and all the Gods of the Abyss on
the subject of the things about which you desire to get a Sign. Take a
male palm 29 leaves, inscribe on each leaf the names of the gods, and,
after saying a prayer, lift the leaves two by two. The remaining leaf, the
last, read it and you’ll find your sign relating to what interests you, and
you’ll have the revelation quite clear. . . .

[A scare-spell of Solomon, “effective both for children and for
adults”] Come to by the intermediary of this man or this child, so and
so, and enlighten me with precision, for I pronounce your names which
Hermes Trismesgistos has engraved at Heliopolis in hieroglyphic
characters. ...

We have composed this moonbook by putting two small books
together: one is in the hand of the sacred scribe Melampous, addressed
to Nechepso King of Egypt, the other has been found at Heliopolis in
Egypt, in the temple, in the holy-of-holies, engraved in hieroglyphics
under King Psammetichos .. .

Explanations given according to the temples, in use among the sacred
scribes. Because of the evil curiosity of the vulgar, they engraved the
names of plants and other magical instruments on divine statues, so
that no one, without the necessary precautions, might meddle indis¬
creetly in magic, because of the errors that then resulted. We however
give the solution, drawn from a large number of copies and secret
writings of every kind . . , BS

After this glance at secret and sacred sources, we may turn back
to the theme of forbidden knowledge. The Kore Kosmou tells
further how God warns the souls not to commit any act of revolt

or else by my sacred breath £ pneuma\ , by this mixture \krama\
out of which I have created you, and by these soulmaking hands,

I won’t be long in forging chains and penalties for you.” But:

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

After taking what had been mixed of matter, my son Horos, at first
they sought to understand it, then they worshipped the mixture, work
of the Father, and asked themselves of what it was composed. That
wasn’t easy for them to recognise. Then indeed, as they were given up
to this very research, they were overcome with terror of encountering
the Father’s wrath and they set themselves to carry out his will. 56

The apocryphal Book of Enoch (middle or end of 2nd century) lays
down that the source of human sin is the forbidden knowledge
taught to men by the angels overcome by love of women. In their
heavenly homes the angels knew no women, but now they
instilled into the daughters of men their own spirit of darkness,
with which they gorged themselves before coupling. They poured
out all the hidden things: “ pharmakeiai [drugs or charms] and
spells and root-gatherings”, and they disclosed the lore of herbs.
“Others revealed the workings of metals and precious stones, the
dyeing art, and the use of spells, astrology, semiotika, star-watching,
moon-leading.” Semiotika means Signlore; probably here it
refers to the art of interpreting the sky, but it could also refer to
the medical art of diagnosis. George Synkellos writes of “the
signs [semeia] of the earth, the signs of the sun, the signs of the
moon”. In Enoch these pursuits beget a great impiety; the women
bear giants to the angels; the giants devour human beings—and
probably through their example men learn to eat flesh. Men appeal
to God, who announces a day of judgment. Similar ideas appear
in the Hermetic Asclepius, in the Egyptian Gnostic works from
Chernoboskion, and in the Clementine Homilies (probably 4th
century). 57

Enoch is of interest also as connecting the scheme of planetary
metals with creation. The heavens are regarded as made of
mountains of metals: “Then my eyes saw all the hidden things of
heaven that shall be, an iron mountain, and one of copper, and
one of silver, and one of gold, and one of soft metal, and one of
lead.” Elsewhere we hear that silver and soft metal come from the
earth; lead and tin from a fountain by which an eminent angel
stands. Also there are Seven Mountains of Magnificent Stones,
each differing from the other, and “Seven Mountains full of
choice nard and aromatic trees and cinnamon and pepper.” As
for creation:

And then I made firm the waters, that is the depths, and I surrounded
the waters with light, and I created Seven Circles and I fastened them

44 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

like crystal, moist and dry, that is to say, like glass and ice, and as for
the waters and also the other elements, I showed each of them their
paths, to the Seven Stars, each of them in their heaven, how they should
g°-

This glance at hermetic and gnostic writings, which can generally
be dated of the 3rd century, has not given us any sure links with
alchemy; but it has helped us to feel something of the atmosphere
of the period, of the spiritual and intellectual climate when the
work of Bolos of Mendes was having its effect. The references to
baphika, dyeing processes, among the forbidden arts, perhaps
provides a link with the alchemic world. Thus, the fourfold
division of tinctures (gold, silver, precious stones, purple), which
we find with Bolos, is in effect found in Enoch. “The angel Azael
taught men how to forge swords and he made them recognise the
metals and the art of treating them.. ., precious stones of all
sorts, and tinctures.” If we look at the two important chemical
papyri, we find the first (Leyden) deals with dyeing of gold and
silver, the second (Stockholm) with dyeing precious stones and
stuffs. Ancient alchemic treatises at times have the names of
Physikai Baphai. The fragmentary work of Bolos is given no title
in the MSS, but it probably was Baphika or Books of Physikai
Baphai or merely Dyeing Books (Biblioi Baphikai). 5S And when we
look more closely at the cosmogonic pictures of the hermetic
writers we feel yet closer to the alchemists. Take the opening of
the Poimandres. One day, as the narrator meditates, he falls into a
sort of trance—as if all his senses were bound: “as happens to
those overwhelmed by a heavy sleep after eating too much” or
by extreme fatigue. He has a vision of a huge person, who announ¬
ces himself as Poimandres, “the Nous [mind] of the Authentia
[absolute power]”. The dreamer says, “I want to be instructed as
to beings, understand their nature, and know God. O, how I
wish to hear.” Poimandres bids him remember all that he is told.

At these words, he changed in aspect and suddenly everything opened
before me in a moment and I saw a limitless vision, everything become
light, serene and joyous, and at the sight I was smitten with love. And a
little afterwards there was a darkness showing up below and coming
in its turn, fearful and sombre, which rolled in tortuous spirals like a
snake, as it seemed to me. And this darkness changed into a sort of
liquid nature, shaken in an indescribable manner and exhaling a vapour
such as comes from fire and producing a sort of noise, an unspeakable

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

groaning. Then there jetted from it a voice of appeal, without articula¬
tion, such as I compared with a voice of [fire]. 59

The imagery seems strongly alchemic; we see an experiment of
boiling liquids, of smoky exhalations, of spiralling vapours.
Earlier demiurges put the elements together in direct composi¬
tions; work like carpenters or potters; compute like geometers
or mathematicians. But here God is working as a chemist. We
get the same sort of alchemic god in the Kore Kosmou.

As he wanted the upper world to be no longer inert, but had decided
to fill it with pneumata [spirits], so that even in detail it might not
remain motionless and inactive, he began to play the Artisan [or, to
carry out the Art, Techne], using sacred substances for the production of
the work.

Taking from himself sufficient pneuma, and by an intelligent mixture
uniting it with fire, he brewed it up with certain unknown substances.
Then, having unified this product, each element with another, while
accompanying himself with certain secret incantations, he very strongly
agitated the whole mixture, till there boiled up to the surface of the
mixture a sort of matter, subtler, purer, more transparent from
the ingredients of which it was made. This was translucent, and only
the Artisan saw it.

And as it did not melt in the heat when it was drawn out of the fire,
nor grow cold when completed out of the pneuma, but fully kept, in its
particular and appropriate nature, the composition of the mixture that
formed it—composition that precisely, basing himself on the most
favourable name and the fact that it acted comfortably with this name,
God called Psychosis [Animation].

From this crust God made to be born in adequate number myriads
of souls, fashioning for his design with order and measure, as a worker
of experience and in fitting propertion, the foam issued from the mixture
itself, so that there was not the least difference between the souls more
than was necessary: taking into consideration that the foam frothing to
the surface after God had done his stirring was not everywhere the
same. The first layer was better and denser than the second, and
altogether purer; and the second layer, inferior enough to the first, was
still much better than the third. And so on till the sixtieth rank of souls
completing the total number.

God established by a law that the soul would all be eternal since
they came from a single substance that he alone had known how to
bring to perfection. And he assigned them sections and depots in the
heights of the celestial nature, so that they might turn the cylinder
according to a determined order and a suitable disposition, and might
make their Father rejoice. 60

historical references

46 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The turn to a geometrical form, the cylinder, at the end comes as
a jarring note after the fluid chemical idiom of the preceding parts,
which describe the processes transforming spirit into individual
souls, pneuma into psychai. These passages from Voimandres and
Kore Kosmou are highly sophisticated and do not suggest rough
sketches by some tyro at an alchemic type of cosmogony. How
far back did the type go ? We have a valuable clue in the Ptolemaic
creation-myth set out at the entry of the great hypostyle hall at
Karnak. There Ptolemaios VII (Euergetes II), 145-116 b.c., in his
dedications on the second Pylon, covered with reliefs in his own
image the face of the gate, which seems to have been previously
undecorated; and he remade the reliefs of Ramses II on the

5. Ancient Egyptian goldsmith at crucible

southern wall of the window-opening. The operation can thus be
described as a fresh consecration in his name. Cosmogonic ideas
are given a new form. “Pie made it [Thebes], he created it, he
cooked it with the Flame of his Eye as Land on the Water’s edge.
He [still] gives so that it rejoices in the heat of his Uraeus, great-
of-flame.” 61 In the hymns of the Leyden papyrus going back to
Ramses II we read, “Water and Earth were in it [Thebes] at the
beginning. Sand came to establish a territory, to constitute a soil.
When that emerged, the Earth was.” There, as in Genesis, we fin d
expressed a division or separation-out of the two elements,
nothing more. And we find this idiom still repeated in Ptolemaic
days, e.g. “You are the Sand . . . from which was taken to create

1 lie Two Lands.” A halfway house, it is true, may be found in the
Ptolemaic texts at Medient Habu on a little temple consecrated to
the primordial gods of Thebes. There we are told that Amun-Re
made the light shine in the darkness and (made?) every day and
every night; he shone on the waters and the earth was in darkness;
all the universe was in the liquid abyss; by the light he produced
dryness; and organised everything; at once the father and the
mother of the gods, he ordered the return of the sun after each
setting.. . ; he made the sky for his soul’s cradle, and the akhet
(horizon) hides his person. Here we see the heat of the sun’s rays
used to explain the drying-out process; and we can attribute the
reasoning to a general growth of rational thinking, which sought
for as natural an explanation of phenonema as possible; there
seems no need to invoke a Jewish influence, that of Genesis / 12
However, we go much further when the action of the sun’s rays is
supplanted by that of a cooking process. We then move from a
natural process to one derived from human techniques. The
account given by the historian Diodoros of the world’s origin in
the last century b.c. shows a link with the Karnak text rather than
with Greek cosmogonies. Thales seems to have taken over the
earlier Egyptian notion of a primitive cosmos of water, out of
which the earth merely emerged in division to float like a raft.
Anaximandros had a more elaborate system in which fire or heat
played its part in bringing about the separations of the elements;
but the movements involved are wholly mechanical. Diodoros
on the contrary shows definite if sketchy chemical notions. First
was a primal unity; then came the separatings-out.

The air gained the power of ceaseless motion; and as it is light and
buoyant by nature, the fiery part of it gathered into the highest regions,
with the result that the sun and other heavenly bodies were caught up in
the total whirl [dine]. Meanwhile the slimy muddy part, with the conden¬
sation of the wet sections, settled by reason of its weight at the bottom.
Then, stirred up and churned over continually, the wet parts formed the
sea, while the more solid parts became soft muddy soil. As the sun’s
fire shone on the land, the latter became first of all firm; then, as its
surface was in a ferment because of the warmth, portions of the wet
swelled up in masses in many places, in which pustules covered with
delicate membranes made their appearance. Such a phenomenon may
still be seen in marshland when very hot air passes suddenly over
frozen ground. From these, living creatures were generated by the
heat. 63

48 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

And so on. Diodoros was much interested in Egypt and its
thought. The source of his imagery must be sought in the Egypt
of his day, in the intellectual circles of Alexandreia rather than in
earlier Greek philosophy. The Karnak text and his formulations
do not look back; they look forward towards alchemy. At
Karnak we meet the notion of boiling; Diodoros adds fermenta¬
tion; and a further stage appears in an hermetic fragment from the
Discourse to Ammorr.

The Nature of the All supplies the All with Two Movements, the one
according to the power [djnamis\ proper to it, the other according to
activity [energeia]. One penetrates throughout the whole world and
maintains it from within; the other is coextensive with the world and
envelops it from outside. And these two movements go and come
together throughout all things.

1 he Nature of the All, bringing to birth the things which come into
being, gives the facility of growing to all that is born, on one side
sowing its own seeds, on the other side having a mobile matter at its
disposal. Once moved, matter warms itself up and becomes fire and
water, one full of vigour and force, the other passive. Fire, opposed to
water, dries up a part of it, and thus is formed the earth floating on the
water. Water continues to be dried up all around, and so there is dis¬
engaged from the three [water, earth, and fire] a vapour. Thus is born
the air.

These elements have entered into combination according to the
harmonic relation, and, of their own accord, there is a born a pneuma
and a seed analogous to the enveloping pneuma. This pneuma , once
fallen into the womb [or matrix] does not remain inactive in the
interior of the seed. And as it does not remain inactive, it transforms the
seed, and that, by this transformation, acquires growth and size. 64

Here we see various Aristotelian formulations in the process of
change under pressure from Stoic ideas, which introduce the idea
of dynamic penetrating all things and thus vitally linking them. As
part of this more active conception, the Aristotelian mixtures and
dissolutions of the elements cease to be merely a matter of
arithmetical proportions—the harmonic relation; they take on a
chemical aspect, or at least are explained in terms of heat-processes
and organic changes. This passage perhaps gives us a clue as to the
way in which Stoic notions of pneuma helped to break down the
old abstractions and make men search out dynamic and organic
lines of explanation for phenomena. By the 6th century we find
Simplikios, the last Neoplatonist, stating, “Matter is always truly

HISTORICAL REFERENCES

i lie last sediment. Hence also the Egyptians call it the dregs of the
first life, which they symbolically denominate water, matter being
as it were a certain mire.” Perhaps we can recognise a sort of
c onfused transition between the old and the new attitudes in the
creation-formulas in magical texts, e.g. a spell to be said over
dogbites: “Hear these words of Hor who smothered the heat, who
lias descended to the eternal waters and cast a solid foundation to
die earth.” It is not clear there, however, if the heat-smothering
brings about the emergence of the earth. 66

Attempts have been made to explain the Karnak text as the
result of ideas of Ionian Presocratic philosophy intruding on the
I 'Egyptian world in the 6th century b.c. and spreading with Greek
influences under the Saite kings. This however is a most implaus¬
ible explanation for a 2nd-century text; it is much more natural
to look to contemporary Alexandreia for the place-of-origin of
"l he new ideas. In any event, as we noted, early Greek philosophy
does not show any impact of cooking or smelting processes. Such
an impact does not arrive till the 4th century b.c., when Aristotle
remarks, “Techniques are a copy of nature; it is all the same
whether the processes take place in kitchen utensils or in the
organs of plants and animals.” 66 Biological science is beginning,
with attention paid to processes of organic growth. The verb
which Diodoros uses to express the earth in fermentation seems
first used by Theophrastos in dealing with plants. 67 A big advance
was being made; but it took the Stoic concept of pnenma , of
pervasive tensions in the whole universe, of unifying fields of
force, to provide an effective system in which to incorporate the
new approaches. Processes of cooking or boiling and processes of
brewing or fermenting were among those which laid the basis for
alchemy. Their intrusion into the thought of the 4th century b.c.
thus represents what we may call proto-alchemy in its first
phases.

Diodoros’ account of the effect of the sun in producing minerals
is also worth citing; for it uses the imagery of dyeing or tincturing
which was playing a key-part in the alchemic concepts. Thus,
rock-crystals “are composed of pure water hardened, not by
action of cold, but by the influence of divine fire, and thus they are
never subject to corruption, and they are dyed many hues when
breathed on”. Smaragdi (probably emeralds) and beryllia (diminu¬
tive of beryl), “found in the shafts of coppermines, get their colour
from being dipped and bound together in a bath of sulphur”.

50 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Chrysolites “are produced, they say, by a smoky exhalation due to
the sun’s heat and thus get their colour. So what is called false-
gold, we are told, is fabricated by mortal fire, made by man, by
dipping the rock-crystal into it.” Dark red stones have been made
by greater compression of light; and the colours of birds and
flowers, as well as the smells of the latter, have been brought about
by effects of the sun similar to those begetting the coloured
stones. 68 A chemical idiom drawn from dyeing has been imposed
on the Aristotelean conceptions.

More Historical References

We have now reached the period when alchemy was venturing
more in the open. One aspect of the alchemic climate of thought
is the way in which colour is more and more seen, not as an
incidental quality of objects, but as an integral part of their
nature. We saw that kind of idea becoming strong in Ploutarch.
We find it again in Plotinos, the great Neoplatonist of the later 2nd
century. Colour is felt to be an essential quality thrown out by a
centre of life or power. “That light known, then indeed we are
stirred towards those beings in longing and rejoicing over the
radiance about them. Each one of them exists for itself, but
becomes an object of desire by the colour cast upon it from the
Good, source of those graces and the love they evoke.” Here the
colour is viewed as an expression or revelation of the qualities
embodied in the being, its power of dynamic attraction. “As soon
as the glow from above has pervaded it, the soul gathers strength,
truly spreads its wings,” and rises in quest of the higher object.
The psyche is itself like gold covered with dirt. That is, it owns the
highest constellation of qualities, but has to regain or liberate
these from a contamination or overlaying by matter of a lower
level. 1

Some elements of these positions go very far back. We are
reminded of the Homeric passage where divinising gold and silver
are shed as a ebaris or grace on the hero. But what had once been
an unstable intuition has now become part of an elaborate and
t horoughly worked-out system of thought. Many ingredients have
gone into this system—Pythagorean, Platonic, and Stoic; but to
1 he Stoic concept of pervasive tensional force has been added ideas
drawn from alchemy: the idea of a hierarchical system of levels in
matter, with gold as highest level, expressing complete stability
and inner harmony. There is an interesting phrase in Loukian’s
account of Peregrinos’ self-immolation by fire at Olympos: “he

52 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

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hoped to be set up golden.” The verb used, anistemi, can mean
both “set up a statue” and “resurrect from the dead”. 2 And we
may note the phrase in Latin “to have a gold beard”, meaning
“to be a god”. 3 The origin here however seems to lie in the days
when Roman looters came up against the ivory-and-gold tech¬
niques of Greek statuary.

Further, in an argument about Matter, Plotinos makes a direct
reference to alchemy, assuming the possibility of both an upward-
transformation into gold and a downward one into water:

. . . Corruption is of that which is composite. But if this be so, each
sensible thing consists of matter and form. This too witnesses induction,
demonstrating that the thing which is corrupted is a composite.
Analysis likewise proves the same thing: as if, for instance, a pot should
be resolved into gold; but gold into water; and the water being
corrupted will require an analogous process.

The views of Plotinos about gold and dirt can be found also
among the Valentinian Gnostics, who divided men into pneumatikoi,
who possessed gnosis, and animal, who were merely bound to obey
the moral law. The men of pneuma could take no harm from the
world any more than gold lost its essential quality when dipped in
excrement. 4 Iamblichos, a Neoplatonist around a.d. 300, linked
the theurgic art or techne —the art of controlling the gods or divine
force in various ways—with the discovery of “suitable receiving
instruments”. The art thus “often connects together stones,
plants, animals, perfumes, and other sacred objects, perfect and
divine, and of all this makes a perfect and pure receiver”. He says:
The custom that invokers have of bearing stones and herbs, of
binding certain sacred bonds and unbinding them, of opening what
is closed and of changing the intentions of those who receive the god,
by making them praiseworthy instead of harmful, as they were—all
this shows well that the pneuma comes from outside. 5

These passages must be read in terms of the thesis of sacrifice he is
setting out, according to which the fire suppresses and also assimi¬
lates the matter of the offerings, transforming it upwards inside a
hierarchical system. He discourses on

the offerings of sacrifices by fire which devours their matter and
suppresses it and assimilates it without being assimilated. For this
offering leads to the divine fire, celestial and immaterial, but is not
dragged down by its weight to below, in the direction of matter and

generation.

il there were some pleasure or joy coming from the vapours of
mailer that charms the daimones, matter would remain in its integrity;
for the efflux coming from it would then be more abundant for those
to whom it is destined, instead of it being wholly consumed and
destroyed and transformed into a pure and subtle fire.

I le sees the processes of transformation of matter as simultane-
i nisly processes of transformation of man, exactly in the key of the
alchemists:

All that is in us becomes like to gods, just as the fire assimilates all
hard and solid objects to subtle and luminous bodies; and it carries us
also by sacrifice and the fire of the altars to the divine fire, just as fire
mounts to fire, and this assumption draws up to the divine and celestial
beings what is heavy and solid. 6

The theurgic process of transforming man and matter by means of
lire corresponds very closely to the alchemic fires of transforma¬
tion. As a thaumaturge, a wonderworker, Iamblichos himself
sought to transform his body; and Eunapios records the ideas
held about him:

“A rumour has reached us through your slaves that when you pray
to I he gods you rise aloft from the earth more than ten cubits to all
appearance—that your body and your garments change to a beautiful
golden hue—and presently when your prayer is ended your body
becomes as it was before you prayed. And then you come down to
earth and associate with us.”

Iamblichos was not at all given to laughter, but he laughed at these
remarks. And he answered them: “He who thus deluded you was a
witty fellow.” 7

I '.unapios, however, probably believed the account. He tells how
Iamblichos raised up an Eros and an Anteros from two springs,
and how once at a seance when an Egyptian invoked Apollo (Hor),
to everyone’s amazement the god appeared, but Iamblichos said:
“My friends, stop wondering: this is only the ghost, eidolon, of a
gladiator.” 8 In alchemic MSS Iamblichos appears as the author
of two processes of transmutation, though we cannot trust the
attribution. Some magicians at this time, we may note, were
thought capable of completely changing their shape. Ammianus
tells us of charges against Papa, King of Armenia: that he was
“wonderfully skilled through the spells \incentiones : pipe-
blowings] of Circe in changing and weakening men’s bodies; and
3

54 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

MORE HISTORICAL REFERENCES

they added that, having by arts of that kind struck them blind and
by changing his own form and that of his followers, he passed
through their lines.” 9

Some later historians tell us that Diocletian destroyed the alchemic
books in Egypt. John of Antioch, writing under Heraklios in the
7th century, is the first we know to tell the story, though it has
been suggested that he is following the historian Panodoros, an
Egyptian monk, of the early 4th century. Panodoros, who found
many faults in the work of Eusebios while drawing extensively on
it, was often cited by George Synkellos. “Diocletian,” we are
told, “had burned about 290 of the ancient books of Chemia dealing
with gold and silver so that men might not enrich themselves by
this art and draw sources of wealth from it, which would enable
them to revolt against the Romans.” 10 The story is also told in the
Acts of St Prokopios. Our version of these Acts seems of the 10th
century, though they were cited at the Second Council of Nikaia
in the early 8th and the first reduction may go back to the time of
Julian in the 4th. 11 If we may trust the account, alchemic activi¬
ties must have been widespread and have become linked with the
growth of Egyptian nationalism in a protest against the imperial
system.

No alchemic text however refers to the persecution. This lack
may be due to prudence. Throughout its early years alchemy had
been associated with arts such as astrology which were liable to
attract unwelcome attention from the authorities; and the
practitioners may have felt averse from perpetuating any memories
of suppression. To own magic books had become a crime that
involved the burning of the books and the exile of the owners to
an island. Poor folk, humiliores, found with such books, were liable
to suffer capital punishment. 12 Constantius, Valentinian I, and
Valens strove to put down the arts of divination, astrology, and
magic. Constantius made the consultation of a professor of magic
an offence punishable by death. 13 Certainly there is no reason to
consider an attack on alchemists at all unlikely in such a world.

Quite possibly there was something of a campaign against
alchemy as part of the drive to reform the mints in the period of
Diocletian and Constantine. The empire had undergone an acute
period of inflation and monetary collapse; and there was a need to
reorganise the coinage on a new level. In the decades of confusion
there seem to have been many attempts by the moneyers to twist

things to their own profit. About 320, for instance, Pannonia
si 111 wed vast enterprises in the production of false money, gold
nnl bronze both being involved. 14 The clearest statement of the
law of counterfeiting occurs in two constitutions of Constantine.
I!ic first, of November 318, is addressed to the Vicar of Africa,
but its terms suggest a general application all over the empire.
Still, 1 lie Carthage mint had been closed down a few years before,
lifter the suppression of a 311 revolt, and the government of
Africa may have had a particularly grave problem of money-
I.iking to tackle. Constantine laid down that the punishment for
iiiliillcrina numismata was to depend on sex and social status. A
tleeurion or his son was liable to perpetual exile, with confiscation

I >i property at the emperor’s discretion; a plebeius was to go into

II need labour for the rest of his life, losing all his property; a slave
w in to die. On 6 July 326 a further constitution, addressed to the
I ’n >c< >nsul of Africa, tightened up the previous provisions, making
Ions of property automatic for anyone found guilty. The reason
lor the law was stated as the need to keep the mints fully
employed. 15

further enactments went on during the 4th century. For
instance, a constitution of 18 February 343 offered a reward to
informers who brought about the conviction of counterfeiters of
gold coins. Men who forged the coins or clipped genuine ones

6 . Workshop of a moneyer at Rome

56 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

were to be burned alive. That forgeries were being extensively
carried out is suggested by a constitution of 12 February 149,
which, while ordering that metal-workers who “purged” bronze
coins of their silver coating should incur the capital punishment,
added that those on whose estates and in whose houses the opera¬
tion was conducted, should lose their property. 16

The 326 constitution, we may note, used the odd term “false
fusion of coins”, thus referring not to the coins’ falsehood but to
the composing metal. Ulpian had described two ways of tampering
coins, using the verbs fingere and tingere. Fingere, to touch, probably
meant the removal of gold by rubbing, which was less easy to
detect than the use of a file; tingere , to wash or dye, has been taken
to refer to the use of aqua regia to remove gold—many coins of the
early 7th century found at Alexandreia had thus been treated. 17
But in view of the common alchemic usage of the term “dyeing”
for the production of colour-changes in metals, we may ask
whether tingere did not have a wider sphere of reference, including
attempts to colour coins, to give a golden or silver look to copper
coins.

Certainly we should expect at least some members or groups of
mintworkers, monetarii, to become interested in alchemy in these
disturbed years. They were certainly suspected of all kinds of
adulteration, though Constantine’s wording suggests that they
were thought to do their counterfeiting, not in the superintended
workshops, but on premises provided by accomplices. Suspicions
about their activites reached such a point that the anonymous
reformer-and-inventor of the 4th century, who made a report to
the government, thought they should all be forced to work on an
island where they would have no contact at all with the outer
world. 18

The story about the suppression of alchemists linked them with
the forces of national revolt in Egypt. Certainly the monetarii could
become leaders of discontent. Aurelian had to suppress a revolt
of theirs at Rome with some 7,000 dead; and fear of the mint-
workers and the public leatherworkers in Kyzikos made Julian
forbid the Christians in his retinue to enter the town lest they
should join those societies in some sedition. 19 There thus seems
nothing unlikely in the theory that alchemists were lumped
together with counterfeiters in general by the imperial authorities
at this time, and that any of their books, coming under the cate¬
gories of both magic and forgery, would have been burned.

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The monetary situation in Egypt as inflation gathered speed in

I lie second half of the 3rd century is shown by an order issued in
260:

from Aurelios Ptolemaios also called Nemesianos, Strategos of the
( fxyrhynchite Nome.

Since the officials have assembled and accused the bankers of the
h.mks-of-exchange of having closed these through their unwillingness
in accept the Divine Coin of the Emperors, it has become necessary

II in t an injunction should be issued to all the owners of the banks to
open these and to accept and change all coin except what is plainly
spurious and counterfeit, and not to them only, but to all who engage
in business transactions of any kind whatever, understanding that if
ihry disobey this injunction they will encounter the penalties which
in former years his Highness the Prefect ordained for their case.
Signed by me.

The coin was divine through bearing the image of the emperor.
The money being refused was no doubt the silver issues of Alex-
.mdreia which had become very debased. In such a situation the
temptation for capable moneyers and casters to produce yet more
debased coins would be strong.

Official correspondence from Panopolis, dated 298-300, shows
the governmental anxiety over the depreciation of the currency.
There was much official buying of gold, and the authorities were
concerned that the correct price should be paid for it. The terms
used for spurious coins in the order of 260 are paratypos and
k.ibdelos, badly-struck and adulterated. The first term is odd; for
imperfectly struck coins seem to have been usually acceptable
ihroughout antiquity; perhaps it here means merely counterfeit
in general. The word sapros (used properly of things like bone,
wood, fish), meaning rotten, appears in a papyrus about 150 of
bronze coins:

When you said as to the banker that he should have checked the bronze,
we should have examined the rotten staters. I neglected the bronze,
wondering as a man who’s trusted does. Yeti found them rotten and by
your life and that of my children, I disposed of three. Being worthless, I
sent the five to you. Let him swear they aren’t his and let him change
them.

Bronze, cbalkos, seems used of small change; silver, argyrion, is the
usual word for money. To find bronze coins of small value
counterfeited is strange. (We meet hiermarmene , fate, called sapros
in a magic text.)

58 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Not only the authorities were interested in counterfeiting of all
kinds. Such activities were sufficiently widespread and significant
to find their reflection in religious and philosophic thought of a
dissident kind. We meet a Gnostic image of the Counterfeiting
Spirit as that which the Archons of Fatality put into a man at his
creation to make him sin. That is, the Rulers of the Spheres (the
planets) alloyed the original spirit (gold) with baser materials,
which steadily increased in power, weakening the force of the
pure element. The intruding spirit grew ever stronger in the
body and contradicted the motions of the spirit. A Koptic passage
compares its presence there to the copper which, mixed with
silver, was used as an alloy in the piece of money that served to
illustrate the saying: Render unto Caesar the things that are
Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. After death the
Counterfeiting Spirit bore witness against the soul of all the evils
that it had drawn the latter into committing. Thus evil and good
were conceived as a sort of alloy in the body’s mixture. The problem
was to drive out the baser compounds and to release the precious
metals, of which the soul, freed from the counterfeiting or
adulterating forces, would be purely composed. 20

Though we are not yet concerned with alchemic texts, we may
here cite a letter addressed by the alchemist Zosimos, who
flourished about 300, to his sister:

Zosimos to Theosebeia, greeting: The whole Kingdom of Egypt
subsists thanks to these Two Arts: that of timely and that of natural
sands [alchemy carried out by empiric and mechanical systems, and
alchemy that follows the formative methods of nature: sands = earths,
minerals]. Indeed the art that is called divine—that is, the dogmatic
art [working on general or theoretical principles as opposed to
empiricism]—to which are devoted all those who give themselves up
to the quest for all man-made products and noble techniques, I mean
the four arts considered effective—this art was handed over only to
the priests.

As for the treatment of natural minerals, it was a royal monopoly,
and so, if it happened that a priest or a man reputed skilful interpreted
the sayings of the ancients or the lore inherited from his ancestors—
even though he knew these matters and saw his knowledge free from
hindrances—yet he did not practise. For he would have been punished.

Just as the workers capable of striking royal money did not strike
it on their own account—since they’d have been punished—so, under
the Kings of Egypt, the smelting craftsmen, though they knew all
about washing minerals and the series of operations, did not practise

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11 lor themselves. Far from that, it was precisely to prevent such activity
dial lhey were organised in military fashion as workers for the royal
treasuries. They had further individual chiefs, treasury-overseers, and
arehistrategoi. In short, they were all sorts of tyrannous rules for
smelting. In effect, according to an Egyptian law, it was even forbidden

10 write on these matters and publish them abroad. 21

The opposition of empiricism and theory we shall discuss later
when we come to Zosimos’ treatises; what is relevant here is the

11 me of the document, which accords very well with a period when
alchemists were lumped together with forgers, and were being
suppressed. We may note here that Zosimos links the tradition of
secrecy with the need to escape persecution and prosecution. A
variant text ends by saying the tyrannous rules applied not only to
1 1 ic smelters, but to all goldminers. “If anyone was caught digging
1 mine, by an Egyptian law he had to deliver up his product after
depositing the account in writing.” The Egyptian kings to whom
Zosimos refers cannot be the Roman emperors; he is probably
thinking of the Ptolemaic kings. The account by Agatharkides
(gi veil in Diodoros) of the goldmines in Nubia under the Ptolemies
depicts work-conditions of desperate misery, in which death
■ amc as a welcome release. Under the Romans the workers in
mines and quarries were often condemned criminals; they were
under military control, with a statio generally adjoining the
miner’s camp. 22

That alchemy and counterfeiting were closely entangled at this
period is further suggested by the Leyden and Stockholm Papyri
dealing with tinctures for imitating metals, pearls, precious stones
and other such matters, and dated to the second half of the 3rd
century. Recipes for counterfeiting gold and silver are included,
with directions that show they were intended to deceive.

\(InIteration of Gold. An equal part of misy and Sinopic red to an equal
part of gold. Put the gold in a furnace and when it’s bright, add each
of die other ingredients. Take out and let cool when the quantity of
gold is doubled. (Leyden, recipe 17.)

Making of Silver. Clean white soft tin 4 times, melt 6 parts of same
with 1 mna of white Galatian copper. It becomes prime silver that will
deceive even skilled workmen, who won’t suppose it made by such
a treatment. (Stockholm, 3.)

Another recipe. Add 6 parts purified tin and 7 parts Galatian copper
lo 4 parts silver, and the resulting product will pass unnoticed for
silver bullion. (Stockholm, 4.) 23

60 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The word for adulteration is dolos : trick, cheat. Misy, mentioned
by Dioskorides and Plinius, seems a mixture of basic iron and
copper sulphates produced by a natural oxidation of pyrites;
apparently used for the surface removal of copper from base
gold and as a mordant in dyeing (chemical papyri), arsenical
mixtures for whitening copper, in surface cleaning or coloration
of metals, in yellow varnishes for such colourings , and in what
was called “yellow sulphur” (alchemic MSS).

Julius Firmicus Maternus, astrologer of the 4th century, is the
first known writer to use the term Alchemy. “If it is the House of
Mercury, it gives Astronomy. That ofVenus announces Songs and
Joy. That of Mars, Arms . . . That of Jupiter, the Divine Cult and
the Knowledge of Laws. That of Saturn, the Science of Alchemy.”
The prefix al- had no doubt been added by some later copyist, who
knew the Arabic term; and we may assume that Firmicus wrote
Chemia or Chjmia. Saturn was master of lead; and according to
Olympiodoros, Osiris was both a synonym for lead and his tomb
the emblem of Chemia. (For that tomb was the place of resurrec¬
tion as well as of death.) Firmicus, we noted, drawing it seems on
Petosiris-Nechepso, cited the aphorism of nature rejoicing in
nature, and so on. 24

Proklos in the 5 th century was well aware of alchemy. In a
passage setting out the Neoplatonic creed of the vital unity of
matter and the kosmos, he begins by commenting on the attempts
of astronomers to explain by mechanical means the irregular
motions of the heavens as made up of regular and circular ones,
and on those of the calendar-makers to imitate nature which had
created everything before they started with their calculations. He
goes on:

And there are those claiming to make gold out of the mixture of
certain species, while nature makes the one species of gold before the
mixture of those species of which they speak. And everywhere we
see the same attitude: that the human soul hunts after nature with
skilful devices to find how things are generated. As for the stars, there
is a purpose in this, which, not by chance, has given men success in
their inquiries into the regular motions of the bodies moving in circles;
for this, they assert, is fitting to divine bodies. 25

Proklos is so filled with a sense of wholeness that he cannot quite
stomach any analytic or decomposing processes, even if their aim

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Li Id rediscover or reaffirm the unitary nature of process. However,
bis position is pervaded by astrologic and alchemic attitudes:

( Mild and silver and every metal, like other substances, grow in the
c.irtli under the influence of the celestial gods and their emanations.
<inld is attributed to the Sun, silver to the Moon, lead to Kronos,
in id iron to Ares. These metals have their origin in heaven, but exist
in die earth and not on those that emit these emanations. For nothing
involved in matter is admitted in heaven. And though all substances
originate from all the gods, there is yet in everything another specific
prevalence, some belonging to Kronos, others to the Sun. The men
given to meditating on these matters compare these and attribute to
them various faculties. These substances as a result are not the private
property of gods, but are common property; for they originate in all
ol them, but do not reside in them. The active powers do not need
them; but they are compounded on earth through the influence
emanating from the gods. 26

I lc is explaining why in Plato’s Republic the city-guardians do not
consider gold and silver, or any other things whatever, as their
own private property. His terms are simultaneously astrologic
and alchemic. Again, in commenting on the meaning of Plato’s
words about the invisible rivets that weld together the particles of
m:i l ter, he employs various technical terms such as are to be found
in the Leyden and Stockholm papyri; and further he cites what
seems an alchemic aphorism: “All things are dissolved by fire and
glued together by water.” 27 Perhaps another such aphorism under¬
lies his remark, “The better cause always conquers the lesser”. 28

The passage above about gold and silver seeks to express both

I lie unity of the metals and their differentiation. The techniques
and calculations of astrology had done a great deal to enable men

II > grasp the concept of a vast complexity of interacting influences
upon and inside a single situation, which continued to possess its
(>wn living unity. Thus Ptolemaios in his Tetrabiblos, arguing that
knowlege is obtainable by astronomical means, and discussing
how far such knowledge can go, remarks:

A very few considerations would make it clear to all that a certain
power, emanating from the eternal aitherial sustance, is dispersed
through and permeates the whole region about the earth, which is
everywhere subject to change, since, of the primary sublunar elements,
lire and air are encompassed and changed by the motions of the aither,
and in turn encompass and change everything else, earth and water
and the planets and animals therein. 29

6z ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

MORE HISTORICAL REFERENCES

Then after discussing the various effects of sun and moon on the
earth and its creatures, he adds: “Then, too, their aspects relative
to one another, by the meeting and mingling of their dispensations,
bring about many and motley changes.” Dispensations is
diadoseis, which gives a strong effect of the interpenetration of the
distributed influences; and motley is poikilai, which suggests
many-coloured, dappled, as well as the more abstract “various”. 30
Ptolemaios goes on to consider how “there are circumstances of
no small importance and no trifling character, which merge to¬
gether to cause the special qualities of those who are born. For
differences of seed exert a very great influence on the special
traits of the genus.” This leads him to discuss the differences
caused in individual lives by the places where they are born, the
ways of rearing and the customs there, and so on. On such lines
as these astrology helped men to think concretely at once of both
multiplicity and unity in processes, and played its part in b rin g in g
about the alchemic disciplines.

Aineias of Gaza was a Neoplatonist who wrote a dialogue on the
immortality of the soul and the body’s resurrection. Flourishing
in the late jth century, he seems connected with a highly educated
monastic circle who were the first to cite from the corpus of works
attributed to Dionysios the Areopagite; and he finally went over
to Christianity. 31 In his dialogue, after arguing that the body,
formed by the union of the four elements, reproduced them by its
decomposition, he went to discuss the permanence of Form as
compared with Matter.

7. Smiths from the region of Laodikeia

6 3

The form subsists while the matter undergoes change; for the latter is
made so as to take all qualities. Let it be a bronze statue of Achilleus.
Suppose it destroyed and its pieces reduced to small fragments. If
now an artisan gathers the fragments up, purifies them, and by a
singular science transforms them into gold, which he again gives the
figure of Achilleus, there will be gold instead of bronze in it. But it
will still be Achilleus. Thus behaves the matter of the perishable and
corruptible body, which by the creative art becomes pure and
beautiful. 32

Aineias is giving his version of the eternal Platonic Ideas, using a
((immon theme (the broken-down, reconstituted state) in his own
way; he is the first we know to introduce overtly the alchemic
transformation in this connection. He goes on with a direct
description of alchemists.

The changing of matter for the better has nothing incredible in it.
Thus it is that those learned in the art of matter take silver and tin,
make their externals disappear, colour and change the matter into
excellent gold.-With divided sand and soluble natron, glass is made:
that is, a new and shining thing. 33

I Ic speaks in pure alchemic idiom; for the practitioners saw their
work, as we have noted, as a process of death and resurrection.
Thus Stephanos says, “We must strip matter of its qualities to
a 1 rive at perfection; for the aim of philosophy [i.e. alchemy] is the
dissolution of bodies and the separation of the soul from the
body.” 34

I t is likely indeed that the Christians had already, some time
before, taken over' alchemic imagery to express the death and
rebirth of the Martyr. In the account of the death of Polykarpos
of Smyrna (who died in 156) we read:

When Polykarp had launched this Amen heavenward in completing
lus prayer, the pyre-men lighted the fire. A great flame burst out,
sparkling. Then we saw a miracle; and we, to whom was granted the
sight, have been spared so as to relate to others what happened. The
lire, taking the shape of a vault, like a ship’s sail bellied out by the wind,
surrounded the martyr’s body in a circle. And the martyr was in the
midst, not like a body being burned, but like a loaf being baked, or
like gold and silver that is purified in the furnace. As for us, indeed,
1 here was wafted a delicious perfume, as strong as that of incense or
some other of the precious aromatics. 35

MORE HISTORICAL REFERENCES

64 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Eusebios reproduced the narrative, omitting the bread but
keeping the gold and silver; Syriac and Koptic versions follow
his History. The ultimate source of the furnace-image was no doubt
Daniel III; but the form here taken shows alchemic influence. 36
The bread-image brings in the idea of the leaven, of fermentation.
A transitional stage to the version of Aineias appears when the
Fathers of the Church describe, in the case of Polykarpos and
other martyrs, the resurrected body as a statue of noble metal,
purified in the fire. 37 We may note also that Gregory of Nazianzen
speaks of the lead of the flesh”—that is, of the unregenerate
condition that needs to be transformed into heavenly gold. 38

Such imagery was indeed very real and heartening to the
devoted Christian in the days before the Church’s triumph, since
he was liable to be persecuted and burned to death. For him the
Fire had a dual meaning. It represented an ordeal. “The apostle
has promised that a like thing will happen to us,” cried Ambrose,
dealing with fables of Phoenix and Eagle, “when he said: Fire
will prove what is the work of each.” He refers to a plunge into
the spirit (fire) and water; the fire here is also that which at the
world’s end will flood the earth with destroying flames, proving,
purifying, dividing. 39 It, however, is also a redeeming and
transforming force.

Then when the clay of our flesh, as has already been said, has been
cooked by the fire into a vessel \testa\ so that this flesh, previously
pressed down to the earth by a heavy burden, may with the aid of
angels fly away towards heaven after receiving the wings of spiritual
grace, it has here eternity as a genuine and appeasing pledge for its
safety. 40

In this set of confused metaphors we meet the imagery of the
pottery-kiln. By baptism the worshipper is baked into a pot,
hardened by fire into a new birth.

Several Byzantine historians—Kedrenos, John Malalas, Theo-
phanes—tell of an alchemist Johannes Isthmeos who gave the
emperor Anastasios a horse-bit of massive gold. “You won’t
deceive me like the others,” said the emperor and clapped
Johannes into the fortress of Petra, where he died. We assume
that Johannes failed to produce any more gold. His tale gives the
impression that claimants to the power of gold-transmutation
were now fairly common and that they did not hide their claims. 41

|ohannes Philoponos, Byzantine scientist of the 6th century,
was much interested in the relation of colours to various fuels. 42
In discussing the relation of soul and body, and denying that it
1.111 lie defined as juxtaposition, mixture, or intertwining (as with
ropes), he states, “The soul neither merges with the body into
i me substance as in the case of fusion, e.g. in drugs and chemicals,
nor is it completely lacking in affinity and reladonship to it, as is
die case of supramundane powers.” 43

John of Damas (Damascus) in the first half of the 8th century
used alchemy in a poem, the Dioptra, a dialogue between body
.mil soul. The body argues that man’s state cannot possibly be
brought near to God’s, and the soul replies:

It’s just the same as when lead and gold are exiled far apart, a distance
yiiwns between their homes, a vastness separates them. A certain
i raftsman then might come and seek to show his skill, the operation
11I bis art and his scientific lore; he’d take the lead and melt it down
Inside his fiery furnace, he’d show the lead transformed to gold, the
best in quality. All this is marvellous indeed, it’s strange beyond belief,
that what was never gold before should turn to actual gold, what wasn’t
gold should turn to gold, though different at the start. O great display
• if excellence! O great display of reason. 44

but by this time alchemists were no longer shrouded in such
mystery or worked in such a secluded way, even if they remained
strange figures of esoteric lore. The alchemist Olympiodoros
seems certainly the historian of the 5 th century; and by the time of
(Icorge Synkellos, chronicler of the later 8th century, the tradition
has come largely into the open. George knows the main authors
well, recounts the initiation of Demokritos by Ostanes, Maria the
|cwess, and Pammenes. He cites his four books on Gold, Silver,
Stones, and Purple, in almost the same terms as the alchemist
Synesios. (Scaliger thought he was drawing on Panodoros, whom
be certainly knew and praised.) 45 Synkellos also cited passages
from the alchemists Zosimos and Synesios; and some of his
citations have come down in their place in the alchemic
manuscripts.

Then about 850 Ibn-Abi-Yakub-An-Nadim in his encyclopedia,
Kbitab-al-Fibrist, gave a list of writers on alchemy: Hermes has
pride of place.

Works of Hermes on Magic, Books of Hermes to his Son on Magic,
book of fusing Gold, Book addressed to Thoth, on Magic etc. Ostanes

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66 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

of Alexandria: he has written a thousand dissertations on Secrets and
Enigmas etc. Zosimos has followed the same way as Ostanes. He has
written the Keys of Magic, which include a large number of books and
treatises.

The names of the philosophers who have occupied themselves with
magic include Hermes, Agathodaimon, Onatos, Pythagorean Philo¬
sopher of Crete, Plato, Zosimos, Demokritos, Ostanes, Herakles [or
Heraklios], Maria, Stephanos, Chymes, Alexandras, Archelaos, the
Christian Priest Ares. 46

Then follow several names we cannot l i n k with known Greek
alchemists. We are also given a list of book titles, which the author
cites as having himself seen or found recorded in a reliable source.
Among unknown works, we find many that are extant: Dioskoros
on Magic, the works of Maria the Kopt, Alexandras on the Stone,
the Book of the Red Stone, Dioskoros in reply to Petasios, the
Book of Stephanos, the Great Book of Maria, the Book of
Eugenios, the Book of Queen Kleopatra, the Book of Sergios
addressed to the Bishop of Edessa, the Great Book of Ares (or
Horos), the Little Book of Ares, the Book of the Nazarean, the
Book of Demokritos, the Book of Zosimos addressed to All the
Sages, the Book of the Monk Sergios on Magic, the Dissertation
of Pelagios, and so on.

When we review the evidence collected in these two chapters, we
must admit that it is very fragmentary and oblique till we come to
the 8th century. Yet in view of the strange way in which Alchemy,
as the first stage of chemical science, arose and developed, we
could hardly expect otherwise. It is only with the first century a.d.,
with the references by Columella, Plinius and Seneca to Bolos-
Demokritos, and with the comments of Dioskorides on lead and
mercury, that we reach anything like sure ground. Even then the
aspects of alchemy that have reached the more open fields of
culture are slight and obscure. There is however the account of
the emperor Gaius’ attempt and failure to produce gold, to back
up the other references.

Some authorities have set Bolos-Demokritos only a generation
or two before Plinius and Columella. But this seems unlikely. With
such a deeply-buried lore as that of alchemy we must allow a much
longer time for the ideas to percolate upwards from the level of
secret practices. We have seen how ideas from cooking and
brewing impacted on Greek theoretical thinking in the 4th

trulury b.c., especially through the study of botany in the
Arislotelean school. The Karnak text of the 2nd century shows
111.11 such ideas were sufficiently current to affect the cosmological
humiliations of the Egyptian priests. We can then reasonably
11 uijca lure that the nexus of ideas from metallurgy, brewing,
dyeing, perfume-making and so on, which lies behind alchemy,

I i.i< 11 icon active for some time in Alexandreia and had been moving
towards its final synthesis. Bolos of Mendes seems the thinker
icponsible for the first definite step, which brought together a
number of lores and concepts in a coherent form. The 2nd century
'tciiis the best period in which to place him. By the 1st century
a i>. alchemical ideas in a limited scope were beginning to be
mi ire widely known. By the 3rd century they were at their phase
nl most powerful expansion, linked with a large number of
lii 1 ulred developments in the religious and philosophic spheres.

These dates are supported by what seems an early alchemic
lex I, a papyrus written in a round uncial hand of the late 1st or
early 2nd century a.d. It is fragmentary, but some treatment of
1,ilver seems the main theme. We meet something moonlit, the
washing of a stypteria “which the dyers use”, processes of rubbing
and mixing “until the silver” shows a colour which may be of
gi .Id, something described as pure. If the missing word of which
we have ou{s) was in fact chrysou, we could be sure that the text was
dt hemic. (What seems the s of ous was added later on the papyrus.)
A 1 typleria was an astringent substance containing alum or ferrous
t. ide: here it is doubtless alum. It the papyrus is indeed alchemic

I I shows that recipes were being written out in a town like
1 >xyrhynchos round about A.D. 100.

I n any event this text will serve us for the turn into the con-
idcration of the alchemic material itself; and first we must
Inquire into the enigmatic name of the new science.

THE NAME ALCHEMY

The Name Alchemy

The name Alchemy has come down to us through the Arabs,
to whom we owe the prefix al-. But exactly what the chemia-itt
meant is not so easy to make out. There were two forms in Greek
for the name of the art: chemeia and chymia. But as they were at
first used for long only in alchemic treatises, of which we have no
early texts, with no clear references in non-alchemic works, we
have no proof as to which was the earlier form.

Let us start with chymia. This word may be connected with
cheein, to pour or let flow, from which came the verb choaneuein,
to cast in a mould, to smelt, and also the term chyma, “that which
is poured out or flows, a fluid.” We find this usage for chyma in
Aristotle. Alkiphron later has chyma niphados, snowflake; and the
astronomer Ptolemaios speaks of the four chymata or humours: the
hot and the moist, the dry and the cold. Already in the 3rd
century b.c. we find chyma used for ingot or bar, in an inscription
from Oropos; in the 2nd century, in another at Delos dealing with
gold. The term thus intrudes from the metallurgical world as
commonly-used for a cast or smelted product; and this fact gives
it a great claim to underlie the name of Alchemy. 1 Chymia would
mean the art of casting or alloying metals. It seems to occur in a
passage cited by George Synkellos from Zosimos; our Greek
manuscript gives chemeia, but the Syriac version has khumia.
Again, in Olympiodoros we meet chymia, though Johannes of
Antioch gives chemeia, as do the Souida and other late sources. 2 The
claims of chymia are again supported by the name given to an
alchemist. Chymes; but here again we come up against variants,
Chymes, Chemas, Cheimas. Still, it seems plausible that at least by
the time of Zosimos a general term chymia had developed out of
the metallurgical use of chyma to describe, not only alloying, but
also the transformation of metals. We may assume a long period
when the term was evolving underground.

Earlier than any of the verbs the term choanos is attested,

11 leaning a hollow or melting-pot into which metal is poured. In
1 1 ic Iliad, in the forge of Hephaistos:

'I'he bellows, twenty in all, blew on the choanoi sending out a ready
blast of every force to help him along as he laboured hard and again
in whatever way Hephaistos might wish his work go on. And over the
Inc he put stubborn bronze, and tin, and precious gold and silver;
and then he set a great anvil on the block and grasped a massive
hammer in one hand, the tongs in the other.

And Hesiod writes of the earth-convulsions during the battle of
Zeus with Typhon ( Typhoios ):

A great part of the earth was scorched by the terrible vapour and
melted as tin melts, heated by men’s art in well-bored choanoi, or as
iron, hardest of things, is softened by glowing fire in mountain-glens
11 nd melts in divine earth through Hephaistos’ strength. Even so the
earth melted in the glow of the blazing fire.

I ''.utretoi, well-bored, probably refers to the spouts of the pots or
i rucibles, meaning “well-channelled”. Choanos itself means
''pouring-pot or channel”, for a cognate form choane was used for
"lunnel”, and the two terms chyma and choanos show how deep-

II Kited and ancient was the root cheein in the craft-jargon of miners
and smelters.

Chymia (chymeia ) belongs in fact to a series that refer to an
activity or occupation. This, mageia refers to the profession of the
mages as magician; taricheia to that of the embalmer, taricheutes\
metalleia to that of the miner, metalleutes (mineral-quester). Chymia
is the work of the metallurgist or alloyer; and we would expect a
related noun for the man who carried it out—probably chymeutes.
but we have no record of such a word, though the adjective
chymeutikos occurs in the alchemist Zosimos. Indeed metallurgical
and mining terms were slow in getting into literary Greek, though
1 here must have been many of them in common usage. 8 In the
( )dyssey, metallaein means simply to search or inquire in general. By
1 lie time of Plato metalleuein was used for mining (though we find
only the passive in his writings); the verb was used actively by
Philon the Mechanic (3rd or 2nd century b.c.). Plato also used
metalleia for the quest after minerals or underground channels, the
plural of ?netalleion for minerals, and metalleus for the man seeking
minerals or water. The searcher is metalleutes in Strabon.

7° ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

THE NAME ALCHEMY

7 1

Herodotos knew metallon for mine or quarry; but it is not till the
i st or 2nd century a.d. that we find texts in which it means
mineral. However, in such technological matters the literary
evidence can be highly deceptive. We have to look to inscriptions
for chyma as ingot. When metalloidsis was first used for the trans¬
formative process of metallurgy, it is hard to say. The word means
“an alteration into another state”. By chance it sounds as if it
incorporates metallon ; and no doubt because the idea of trans¬
formation had become so imbedded in the very idea of metals and
metallurgy, Plinius made the baseless derivation of metallon irommef
allon , as if it also held a meaning of changing-into-something-else. 4

But how then did the other term, chemeia or chemia, come about?
The form may have occurred as a chance variant of a non-literary
word used for centuries by workers in and around the metal¬
lurgical field. But it has been suggested that it arose through
contamination with chem, Egyptian for “black”, or that chemeia
had nothing at all to do with the terms chyma-chymia but was born
solely out of chem. Egypt was called the Land of the Black or
Fertile Soil, especially with reference to the Delta where much silt
was deposited. The Egyptian word was Kmt, and the hiero¬
glyphic sign has been taken to represent a charcoal-heap, a
crocodile’s tail, or a piece of fish-skin; in Koptic we find two
forms, Saharic and Boharic, pronounced Kime and Khime. The
adjective, however, was expressed by a periphrasis, Vmn-Kime,
“People of the Black”. 5

Philologically then there is not much to be said for the
interpretation of Chemeia as the Black or Egyptian Art. But that
does not disprove some sort of linkage between Khime-Kmt and
Chymia in the minds of alchemical practitioners. We continually
find that the ancients were liable to take similarities in sound as
expressive of some secret or deeply-significant connection; and
if it is true that much of early alchemic developments was carried
on by groups in Egypt, someone or other may have noted a
certain echo of sound in Chytnia and Khime and considered it to be
mysteriously suggestive. Ploutarch tells us:

The Ox kept at Heliopolis, which they call Mnevis [sacred to Osiris
and thought by some to be the sire of the Apis], is black and receives
secondary honours to those paid to Apis. Also, Egypt, which is of a
black soil in the highest degree as well as the black part of the eye,
they call Chemia and compare it to a heart. For it is hot and moist . . , 6

( lea fly then people were generally aware, in Graeco-Egyptian
11 ri les, of the way the term “black” was used in Egypt, with its
various points of reference. We may note also an odd symbolic
n | ulvalence of Black and Gold in Greek thought. Early in July
,140, when the Samian war was being fought, the Proxenos of the
Athenians in Chios invited the poet Ios of that island to meet the
dramatist Sophokles, who had been sent as one of the strategoi of
i lie year to collect contingents from Chios and Lesbos. A school¬
master from Eretria, present at the party, questioned the propriety
of a line by Phrynichos which Sophokles quoted: “There shines
on his crimson cheeks the light of love.” Sophokles in reply
pointed out that colours were used symbolically in verse and art.

I'bus, a poet wrote of Goldenhaired Apollo, but “if a painter had
made the god’s locks golden instead of black, the picture would
not be so good.” 7 So Apollo was shown with black hair, though
i 11 ritual or symbolic terms it was golden.

I n the Kore Kosmou, Kamephis transmits the gnosis to Isis, “when
lie has .gratified her with the gift of the Perfect Black,” and in a
magical papyrus we read, “I conjure you. Lady Isis, whom the
Agathos Daimon [the Good Spirit] agreed should rule in
die Perfect Black.” 8 There seems to be some connection of the
I 'effect Black with revelation or magical activity; and indeed the
i c rm Teleion Melas has been taken to refer to alchemy as the Black
Art or Black Ritual—it could be translated as “the Black Rite”.
The geographical explanation indeed seems the more likely, since
in these late days Isis was looked on as the Lady of Egypt. 9 But
we need not all the same rule out an emotional identification of
Egypt, the Black Land, as the source of all ancient lores and
magics, with those lores and magics themselves—and in particular,
here, with the alchemic art. In an alchemic text, presented as a
revelation of Isis to Horos, we are told how the goddess went to
I lormanouthi (the temple of Horos at Edfu) to receive the
science of Alchemy. She encounters an angel, then a superior
one, Amnael, to whom she gives herself. Amnael tells her the
secret lore on condition she hands it on only to her son. 10
Kamephis, whom we shall see later as Kneph-Agathodaimon, can
also be seen here as Amnael. So we may say that he gave Isis both
Chemia the Blackland and Chemia the Art. 11

There is yet another point. The desire to identify chymia-chettiia
t he art and kmt-chemia the land may have derived from a wish to
assert the Egyptian origin of alchemy against other claimants.

72 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

From the texts we can make out two schools, that of the Egyptians
and that of the Jews. There was rivalry between the two nationali¬
ties here, as in the hermetic or gnostic worlds. A magical text
states: “It is this very Book that Hermes plagiarised when he
named the Seven Perfumes of Sacrifice in his sacred book The
Wing.” Hermes-Thoth, exemplar of the Egyptian school, is
accused of stealing from The Book of Moses . 12 Stephanos writes,
differentiating the Egyptian techniques, which he links with
Hermes and which he approves:

There are certain of the things that suffer restoration. For he [Hermes]
says, that the rainwater [?] of the true art is burned and is fugitive in
fire, but suffers from the fire, and, crossing over, it is not melted. And
[in] the roasting of the projections according to the Egyptian, which
he uses, the drug is not melted in the tincture. So has said the critical
[kritikos] teacher and philosopher and guide: just as a sling passing by
someone may wound him [that which is gone is a result of the strength
of the thrower], so then is gone the wound of the man standing in the
way. But he who has it, has it whoever he is, if indeed it truly is gone.
So also the ash itself runs and tinges indelibly and makes indelible the
cause of the tincture, or the drug is dissolved into its kindred fire and
air, as being fugitive and burnt up in the bellies of its parents.

He thus stresses projection as the Egyptian method.

The melters of gold . . . employ projections according to the methods
of the Egyptian: which matters, corrupted, the Etesian Stone itself
operates when well managed, as also do we. And do not wonder if
from many stones and various species the stone, being one, is born
and is so spoken of. Do you not see that those who cultivate the Muse
and Things of Beauty, as they make animals and glasses and dyes,
make a single stone from many species? Especially they make it from
lead and that which has become bronze-like, so that they may not lack
a carving. And as such useful stones make all such things, from many
stones they make one stone, which they call the Etesian Stone.

National differences also in spells and spellbinders were
recognised. A prayer-and-exorcism by Gregorios asks for
protection against any ill-bringer, “whether a slave or a freeman,
a wizard or a witch, a Persian man or woman, a Chaldean man or
woman, a Jew or Jewess, an Egyptian man or woman, in short
anyone whatever.” 13 The existence of the two alchemic schools is
declared in A Genuine Discourse by Sophe \Kheops'\ the Egyptian and
by the God the Hebrews the Lord of Towers Sabaoth: “For there are

THE NAME ALCHEMY

Two Sciences and Two Wisdoms: that of the Egyptians and that
of the Hebrews.” 14 Further in the works of Maria we meet a curt
claim to a Jewish monopoly of the innermost secrets of the art.
“Do not take it in your hands. It is the Igneous Remedy. It is
mortal.” To this general prohibition she adds the direct order to
non-Jews: “Do not touch it with your hands. You are not of the
race of Abraham. You are not of our race.” 15 Zosimos says that
i he Jews gained knowledge of the sacred art by fraud and then
revealed it. 16 Perhaps behind Maria’s remarks lies a general fear of
touching gold as something with too great an innate power, which
might blast as well as aid. Only the Jews, she insists, can safely
ignore the taboo. We find such a taboo urged in the life of the
Kopt Saint Senuti in the 6th century. 17 Further the Letter of
Ilemokritos to Leukippos states that the writer is going to set out in
ordinary Greek the secrets he has found in the books of Persian
prophets: works with a series of riddles, which had long past been
c< mfided to the Phoinikians by “the ancestors and kings of divine
Egypt”, The writer is seeking to show the priority of the
Egyptians over the Phoinikians. The same national rivalry
appears in a tale told by Rufinus that Persian fire-worshippers
asserted the superiority of the element fire over all the gods of
I <',gypt. So a priest of Kanopos took a perforated vessel of the sort
used for filtering water, stopped up the pores with wax, and set it
on fire; but the fire was soon put out by water issuing from the
holes as the wax melted. After that, Kanopos was represented
with a waterjar-shaped body, a short neck, and very small feet. 18

However, kmt as “black” is not the only possible Egyptian
s< rnree of chemia. It has been suggested that the term derives from
t he Book of Wisdom, the ancient kmj.f , often cited by scribes
from about 2,000 b.c. onwards. Zosimos mistook this work for
the Satire of Trades, in which the toilsome lot of the smith and
other craftsmen is described and compared with the easier life of
1 he scribe. Chemeu, it is argued, could be derived without difficulty
from kmj.f-, and Zosimos and other alchemists linked this chemeu
by using the Greek word chymeutes, metalfounders, for chemists. 19
Such a line of argument is highly farfetched and does not carry
much conviction. However, one advocate of the claims of kmj.f
has argued that the word is derived from the verb km, meaning
“to complete, bring to a close, execute (the preparation of oint¬
ments), finish off (metalwork)”. 20 Flence the title of the Wisdom
Book implied that the work gave the advice needed for completing

74 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

or fulfilling what the gods had already made inherent or poten¬
tial in human actions and material objects in the process of
creating them. Km would thus in one sense mean the repetition of
the original creation of the world—expressing human creativity
as derived from, and imitating, the divine activity. Such an idea
was Egyptian enough: that men merely worked out, repeated,
completed what had been planned and made inherent in things
from the beginning, and that, in doing so, they needed guidance.

The derivation of Kimija from this ancient Egyptian verb is certainly
more logical than deriving it from the other root km, which means
Black and has been used to form the expression (Coptic) KHME or
XHMI meaning Egypt from the black fertile soil of the Nile valley.
The use of this km. Black, for Chemeia might imply that there was a
contrast between the “Black Art”, Egyptian chemistry, and a “White
Art”, such as is often mentioned in the Middle Ages when alchemy
was proscribed as an occult occupation, but which to my knowledge
does not exist in Greek chemical documents of an early period.
(Forbes). 21

But, as we have seen, there is no need to postulate a White Art
against the Black; the contrast is between Black (Egyptian) and
Jewish. It is possible however that some Egyptian derivation
from km in the sense of fulfilment did enter into chemeia , on the
lines of the fanciful etymological identifications already mentioned.
If so, it is of interest to note that we have a duplication in the term
Teleion Melas. For then melas would be a translation of km (black)
while teleion expresses in Greek exactly the meaning of km (fulfil¬
ment). But this is no doubt only an odd accident—not the only
oddity that turns up in this trail of possible derivations of the
word Alchemy. (Teleion, incidentally, could be used to define the
full inundation of Egyptian soil.) 22

No sooner however do we decide that the term chemeia, as
developed by the time of Zosimos, perhaps combined a Greek
metallurgical term with various Egyptian overtones as the
result of the broodings of Graeco-Egyptian practitioners, than we
find that there is an altogether new claimant for the original
basis of Alchemy. We must not forget that we do not know if
chemeia or chymia was the early term. If it was chymia, we must look
also at chymos, which is Greek for plantjuice and is etymologically
linked with cheein like chjmia. Chymos extended its meaning to
include animal juices or humours. Indeed it is hard to say if the

THE NAME ALCHEMY 75

H. Lakopian relief from Chrysapha, about 550-30 b.c. : man with
kantharos, squeezing juice; wife holding pomegranate; boy with cock
and egg; girl with flower (lotus or pomegranate). Also, terracotta of
Kore rising up out of ahalf a pomegranate.

plant or the animal usage was earlier. Aristotle and Theophratos
both use the term of plants; but Aristotle also applies it to animals
and further uses it for juice in general. He also uses it to mean
“taste.” 23 Chymos is in fact cognate with chylos, which in its turn
meant plantjuice, was applied also to animals, and further defined
a decoction, gruel or barleywater. It too was used for “taste.” As
chyle it was employed by Galen for the juice or fluid produced by
(lie digestion of food. Chyma and chymos could indeed be confused,
as we see when Ptolemaios describes the four humours as chymata,
not chymoi , 24 There thus seems a close link between fused metal
and plantjuice in the Greek terms derived from cheein-, a link
between metallurgical and digestive processes. We noted above
1 he way in which cooking, digestive, and fermentative processes
forced their way into the thought of the 4th century b.c. Clarifica¬
tion in the use of the various words from cheein — chymos, chylos,
chyma —may well have occurred at that time, as the first stage to the
emergence of the idea of chemical action in general: chymia or
chemeia.

Chymia may perhaps have referred primarily to the production

THE NAME ALCHEMY

76 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

of juices used in drugs, in magic, and in digestion, and to the
processes that these juices brought about. The juices in question
would be those that had, or were thought to have, a transformative
action on human bodies and on material objects. We may seem
here wandering far from the realm of metallurgy; but we must
recall that juices or other plant-products had a wide usage in
magic apart from medical recipes and the like. They were used in
metallurgy. A traveller in 1862 in Cypros met the Turkish pasha of
Nikosia, “who spoke eloquently over flowers and at times over
Kimiya, a herb having the virtue of converting metals into gold”. 25
This juice was the active principle in an alchemical process, and it
strangely had the very name of our quest. The Persian poet
Firdausi had a couplet:

Not one of the Dead by the Herb was resurrected.

Poorly they all by the Kimiya were effected.

It is seen then that Kimiya as a resurrecting and transmuting herb
had a long history in the regions of Arab influences. Not that the
magic herb was restricted to those regions. In an account of
Indian superstitions we are told how a master (Bhagatjee or
devotee):

ordered a large half-anna copper coin (which was current in 1893
and was the size of a rupee or of a florin) to be brought, and taking
one out of my pocket it was produced at once. Then he directed a
Huqqa claypipe to be made ready. I also sent for some pure tobacco
of my own. Bhagatjee handed over to me a little of some fresh herb
saying that it was to be mixed with the tobacco and the copper coin,
which was in my hand, was to be placed on top of it. When the pipe
was ready (with its charcoal glowing) I was ordered to start smoking
which I continued to do for a little while when he asked me to tip
over the clay pipe, and having done so I found the copper coin had
instantaneously turned into gold. 28

We are not told the name of this herb; but the name of that used in
the Arab world is indeed striking. Was it transferred to the herb
after the introduction of Greek alchemy? or does it give us the
clue to some earlier connection of metallurgical magic of which
we know nothing? In any event its existence makes us pause
before rejecting chymos-chylos as a candidate for the origin of the
term chymia. The notion of the resurrecting and transmuting herb
or herb juice clearly links with that of the herb or water-of-life

which plays a very important part in folklore and myth, which in
l he Near East is found in the epic of Gilgamesh, and which
reappears among the alchemists as the divine water.

The transmuting or resurrecting drug certainly existed in
early Greek rites and myths. Poppy and pomegranate, for example,
seem to have been importantly used in rituals going back to
Minoan-Mykenean days. Associated with the Earthmother, they
no doubt played their part in death-birth ordeals and initiations.
Mekone, where Prometheus met and cheated the gods in the
allocation of the parts of sacrifices, seems to mean Poppyland. In
Asia Minor the production of opium went on into the Roman
period in a big way. Coins of several towns show the poppy.
I’rymnessos (the nearest ancient town to Afiom Kara Hissar,
Opium Black Fortress, where is a chief modern centre of opium
production) struck a design of two ears of corn and poppy;
Synnada and Beudos, close by, had a similar design or one of
corn-ear and poppy-head side by side. The Synnada coins are of
the last century b.c. ; those of Beudos Vetus, of Hadrian. A coin
of Ankyra, minted under Philip, shows the city-goddess holding
in her left-hand a “pomegranate” in a scene closed in by cypress-
trees: the “pomegranate” may well be a poppy-capsule ripe for
slitting. 27

The word papon or papa seems to mean poppy in Anatolian. It
occurs on several altars: thymelai or incense-altars of papon. One
dedicatory altar with a relief of a ripe poppy-capsule is described
in the inscription as a Hermes; it had a saucer-like hollow on the
top where the dedicator (? a priest Diomedes) burned poppy-
opium. (The local folk said that rainwater collected there cured
sick people.) Coins of Colonia Antiocheia show the Tyche of the
town holding in her right hand a lustral branch turned down¬
wards or pouring the contents of a horn-of-plenty on to an altar.
The altar is a thymele papon, and what she pours is opium, the chief
product of the territory and the source of its wealth. It is associated
with Dikaiosyme and her scales, as the goddess of fair dealing. The
word Papai occurs alone on one side of a large sepulchral altar at
Piribeyli, on a pass over Emir Dagh. At Hierapolis we find an
inscription that tells how a council of the official of a guild of
purple-dyers carried out the burning of papa “on the customary
day” once a year, using the interest on 3,000 denars to meet
expenses. (If they neglected the proper investment and caused a
loss, the remaining sum was to pass to the ergasia thremmatike, the

78 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

cattle-raising society—an odd injunction: it has been suggested
that thremma here has the sense of threptos and the society was one
for looking after orphans.) We are not told what deity’s festival
was involved. At Abassos, near Amorion, a funeral ceremony was
to be celebrated at the Mithrakana; and we may note the associa¬
tion of the poppy-offering and sepulchral altars, of the Tyche of
Ankyra with a cypress-grove (? cemetery). Asa drug of communion
with the gods it was perhaps thought to aid the dead in their
spirit-journey, in their afterlife. 28 Prometheus seems to contact
the gods by entering Poppyland: by entering an opium-trance.
As a drug of initiation and death-birth, opium had the value of an
elixir transforming the condition of its user. On an Apulian vase
we see a male and female worshipper approaching an aedicula with
a large poppy growing out of a tomb: an epiphany of the dead man
in plant form. On a higher level are shown beings in a godlike
state. 29

On a grave-relief of 550-530 b.c. from Chrysapha in Lakonia we
see two dead persons (man and wife) in heroised or divinised form.
The man holds a big kantharos and squeezes some juice into it
through a long piece of cloth; the woman holds a pomegranate
(source of the juice) and helps in the operation of straining or
filtering. Below, and in front of their throne, stand a boy and a
girl: the boy holding a cock and an egg, the girl a flower (lotus or
pomegranate?) and a pomegranate. 30 We certainly have here a
representation of rebirth through fruitjuice. The fruit of the
pomegranate is a rich red; in the Balkans it is still considered that
the red flowers stimulate blood. 31 It was similarly venerated in
China, though there it was only one among various immortalising
agents. We may note also that a herb pro?)2etheion was said to grow
on the Caucasus from the bloodlike ichor of Prometheus; it was
golden and caused an earthquake when plucked; Medeia used it to
give Iason invincible or deathless power. And Prometheus was
closely connected with the cults, with the mystery-initiations, of
various fire-crafts such as metallurgy and pottery. 32

That the prometheion itself had some part in such initiations is
suggested by the role of a herb in a myth of the Kabeiric Mysteries.
Clement of Alexandreia tells us:

If you would like a vision of the Orgies \orgia\ secret rites or mysteries]
of the Korybantes, here is the story.

Two of the Korybantes slew a third one, their brother. They covered
the corpse’s head with a purple cloak, then wreathed and buried it.

THE NAME ALCHEMY 79

niter carrying it on a brazen shield to the skirts of Mt. Olympos. So
wc see what the mysteries are: in a word, murders and burials.

The priests of these mysteries, whom those interested call Presidents
i >1 the Rites of the Princes [the Korybantes or Kabeiroi], add a portent
to the dismal tale. They forbade wild-celery, selinon, root and all, to be
set on the table; for they actually believe that selinon grows out of
11 ic blood that flowed from the murdered brother.

It’s a similar custom, of course, that is observed by the women
celebrating the Thesmophoria. They are careful not to eat any
pomegranate seeds that fall to the ground, being of opinion that
pomegranates spring from the Blood of Dionysos.

The Korybantes are called by the name Kabeiroi, which tells us all
about the Kabiric rite. For this very pair of fratricides got possession
of the chest in which the genitals of Dionysos were deposited, and
look it off to Tyrrhenia [Tuscany], traders in such glorious wares.
There they stayed, being exiles, and communicated their precious
lessons of piety, the genitals, and the chests to Tyrrhenoi for purposes
of worship. For this reason, not unnaturally, some want to call
I )ionysos Attis, because he was castrated. 83

We see here the pomegranate as blood-fruit linked with selinon.
'That the murder-rite was metallurgical is shown by Zenobios:
“The brothers put their third brother to death. They bury him
under a mountain. His body changes to iron.” 34 The myth was
thus one of the birth of iron; and selinon had some close link with
i he iron’s myth and craft-ritual. Selinon was an immortalising or
resurrecting herb; for it was used to crown the victors of the
Isthmian and Nemean Games, and chaplets of it were hung on
tombs. It was also a synonym for the vagina and thus was an
emblem for the Earthmother’s genitals as well as of the murdered
brother. The Kabeiric connection with metallurgy is further
shown by the representation of a Kabeiros with a hammer, e.g. on
coins of Thessalonika, where he also holds a rhyton. We also find
a Kabeiros with hammer on the back of a Mithraic stone; on the
front Mithras slays the Bull. 35 An odd survival of one of the
Daktyls (another cult-fraternity or mythical reflection of such a
metallurgical group) occurs in a late magical text where we find
“Damnamanaios and Adonaios and Sabaoth;” Damnamanaios is a
variant of Damnameneus, one of the Idian Daktyls associated
with the Great Mother. Damnameneus, associated with Nikaro-
plex, appears on magical gems. 36

Attempts have been made to find direct alchemic ideas in the
Kabeiric deities and myths. The Kabeiric triad has been thus

80 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

analysed: Axiokersos stands for the Sun (Apollo-Helios), Axio-
kersa for the moon, Axieros as the completed Hermes, the fused
alchemic Hermes—with the fourth figure Kasmilos as symbol of
the Hermetic essence, of harmony and gradation. But this sort of
interpretation makes the early mystery-ideas far too definite; it
mistakes a necessary pre-alchemic phase of simpler fire-magic and
of intuitive images of union and change as the highly sophisti¬
cated product that could only emerge after craft-mysteries had
united with various philosophic schemes and systems. 37 A
pharmakon was used in the Mysteries of Eleusis. The sjnthema or
password, expressing the novice’s fit state for initiation, began,
“I have fasted, I have drunk the kjkeon .” The fast seems to have
lasted nine days. Kjkeon merely means “a mixed and (if necessary)
stirred drink”, but from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter we learn
that it consisted of barley-groats and water mingled with “tender
chleron .” Ovid adds the detail that the barley was toasted before
being crushed into groats. Such groats, in water, produce malt
which may taste sweet and become alcoholic after short fermenta¬
tion. Arnobius, speaking of the rite, says, “I drank out,” that is,
emptied the potion. No doubt the small pots carried by the men in
the procession held a precise measure. Chleron or blechon, used in a
tender (fresh) state, was some variety of pennyroyal. This plant
produces the peppermint-tea drunk widely still in Central Europe;
in North Africa the green leaves are used to make a mild stimulant.
The main ingredient of the poley-oil from the plant, mentha
pulegium , is an aromatic substance pulegone, which in large doses
can bring about delirium, loss of consciousness, spasms. A plant
of the same family in the Sierra Mazateca, Mexico, has the effect of
a phantastmim , 38

It is thus likely that the kjkeon , imbibed on top of a long and
thorough fast, would produce an extreme responsiveness in
which the imagery and rites of the mystery would have a pro¬
foundly exciting effect, making the experience seem indeed a
divine revelation. Blechon-glechon suggests a carminative or anti-
spasmodic, but that does not remove it far from a narcotic. Pindar
uses the adjective for the rivers of the underworld from which
darkness flows out: “The sluggish rivers of the dusky night,” and
Quintos Smyrnaios speaks of the “the sluggish gift of sleep”. In
Aristophanes’ Peace, Hermes recommends a Kjkeon with Mint to
Trygaios who is to wed Opora (Fruit-abundance) and fears that
such a bride will make him sick. Herakleitos, asked by the

THE NAME ALCHEMY

rebellious Ephesians for advice, took a cup of cold water,
sprinkled barley in, stirred it with a branch of the herb, then
drank it down. Hipponax, a tumultuous character, cried out for a
whole bushelful of barley to make a kjkeon and combat his
ponerie , his bad (moral) state. These three last examples suggest
strongly that chleron was thought to have a pacifying effect, a
t ranquillisation of the sort that we noted as effective for the
heightened reception of the messages and symbols of the
mysteries. 39

Glechon gained an immense reputation among the later botanists.
They recommended it for severe thirst, fainting, headaches,
coughs, colics, renal troubles, indigestion, tertiary fever, nervous
maladies, liver-affections, womb-disorders, stings of poisonous
creatures, miscarriages. The Romans called it a panacea, omni-
morbia. How far this high esteem went back we do not know.
The term omnimorbia suggests something of an elixir that protected
against all the ills of the body; and this suits well enough with the
herb’s position in the mysteries, its link with the mother-
goddess. 40

We can now return to the pomegranate. Its connection with
Demeter and Kore seems certainly to point back to a period
before Demeter was a grain-goddess, to Minoan-Mykenean
limes. The archaic cult-image of Athena on the Athenian Akro-
polis held a pomegranate in the right hand; Polykleitos put a
pomegranate into the hand of his Hera at Argo, and Pausanias
remarks that he may not tell the reason. Near the great sanctuary
of Hera at Paestum large numbers of terracotta pomegranates
have been found. Trails then from Demeter, Hera and Athena all
lead back to an ancient goddess of earth and under-earth. 41 Kore
herself, though not at Eleusis, is shown with the pomegranate.
The close link with the mystery-mother appears in the taboo
against eating pomegranates or apples at certain feasts in Eleusis
and Athens: at the Mysteries and at the Haloa (a winter-festival
for women in honour of Demeter, Kore, and Dionysos, which was
characterised by wine-drinking, obscenities, and veneration of
genital symbols). At the Thesmophoria, another woman’s
festival held soon after the Great Mysteries, in which joy alternated
with mourning, the women ate nothing but pomegranates, at
least on one fast day; and they were forbidden to touch the seeds
that fell to the earth. 42

The pomegranate was not a fertility symbol (as appears in some

THE NAME ALCHEMY

82 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

par ts of modern Greece). It represents blood, the blood of murder
and of the broken maidenhead. Clement says that the reason why
the women could not pick up the seeds was because the tree had
sprung from the drops of Dionysos’ blood. Another legend tells
how the tree sprang from the grave of Menoikeus at the gates of
Thebes, where he killed himself to save the city. We are also told
that a pomegranate tree grew from the grave of the Theban
brothers, Eteokles and Polyneikes, who killed each other and
one of whom died for the city like Menoikeus. Pausanias states:

On the tomb of Menoikeus grows a pomegranate-tree. If you break
through the outer part of the ripe fruit, you will then find the inside
like blood. This tree is still flourishing. The Thebans assert they were
the first men among whom the vine grew . . . 4S

There was also a connection between the pomegranate and the
death of Attis. Initiates in the mysteries of Kybele and Attis were
forbidden to eat the fruit; the priests of Attis bore pomegranates
in their hands, as did their statues, or wore pomegranate-wreaths.
Nana (another name for the Great Goddess) ate a pomegranate
and conceived Attis; and the fruit was the pledge of immortality
for the initiates. Agdistis (a bisexual or hermaphroditic form of
the same Goddess) was castrated in her sacred legend; the tree
sprang from her flowing blood. Here the female genitals with
their menstruation are imagined as castrated male-genitals. The
name of the tree in Boiotia and elsewhere was side. Side in myth
was the wife of the hunter Orion and went on an underworld-
journey; we also find her as a virgin who killed herself on her
mother’s grave to escape her father who sought to rape her—
from her blood grew the tree. In an Orphic version Kore was
raped by her father in snake-form. (The name Side was given to
several cities: there we see Side as the fostering Mother.) 44

In the passage cited above from Pausanias there was a direct
transition from pomegranate to vine; and we have seen how the
pomegranate was linked with Dionysos. Rhoio, the personified
pomegranate, was daughter of Staphylos, the Grape (at least on
Delos and Euboia); she bore Anios, who fathered Oino, Spermo,
Elais, Wine-maid, Seed-maid, Oil-maid. 46

We are thus brought back to the Kabeiroi with their selinon as
the product of a mystery-murder, connected with both Dionysos
and pomegranates. The whole complex we have examined makes
more than likely that the craft-fraternities linked with the Great

Mother, Kabeiric, Korybantic, Daktylic, took over her plant-
magic of death-birth and used it in their craft-rituals and pro¬
cesses to ensure the secure movement through critical moments of
change, especially in metallurgy.

The theme of plant-magic is a vast one. Still, here we may find
space for some examples from the book of Martianus Capella on
1 lie Marriage of Mercurius and Philologia. We hear of herbs used
for apotheosis or immortality. One recipe is attributed to Demo-
kritos of Abdera; Plinius cites a book of his on magic herbs. To
save Philologia from being burned up in the fire of the celestial
spheres, she is rubbed with an unguent, in the composition of
which is a wonderful herb that seems the Hundred-headed Plant
known to Plinius. This plant the latter connects with the Mages
and the Pythagoreans; out of it were made a talisman, a love-
phylactery, an electuary of beauty. Its use in Martianus Capella
shows that it could protect against fire and thus live in it; a
metallurgical link seems possible. 46

Another passage describing how Philologia is immortalised and
raised to the level of her divine husband also brings in a herb.

When the goddess saw that she had drunk the cup of immortality, so
ns to teach her in some sort by the symbol [aenigma] of a fillet that she
was leaving earth for heaven and that she had become immortal, she
crowned the virgin with a certain meadow-herb that bears the name
.of . . . , while counselling her to reject all that which, as yet mortal,
she had attached to herself as defence against the power from above;
for, said she, there lay the inferior marks of a decayed and mortal
essence. 47

The name of the herb is not sure. It has been taken as aei^oon
(overliving), but the MSS give lei^os, leukos, leukos —in the last case
with a gloss “a white herb like some lily”. We may then take the
name to be leukos or leukas (white) and link the herb with that
called Candida by Plinius. The interpolator of Dioskorides calls it
gorgoneion-, and Damaskios says the root is like “the maiden whose
head is covered with snaky hair”. 48 From Psellos we learn that
1 he plant grew mostly under earth, but that it popped up to watch
if a girl mated nearby. The interpolator of Dioskorides adds the
synonyms of hundred-headed and moly. The talismanic moly in
I lomer was black-rooted and milky-flowered; but the variety
known to Theophrastos and Dioskorides was yellow-flowered. 49
The name leukos suggests the promontory Leukas where Sappho

84 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

was said to have leapt to her death. In the Pythagorean basilica at
the Porte Maggiore in Rome where Sappho’s ritual-leap of
death-rebirth is depicted, a Victory stands above holding out a
wreath and palm; and there is also in the basilica a winged Orante
with a flower in each hand—the shape suggests a thistleflower. 50

Plants and juices appear in alchemic texts, mostly in reference
to the dyeing and colouring of materials. Thus, saffron seems
used in a yellow dye-liquor for staining metal, which would later
be lacquered. (Donne in his 8th Elegie wrote, “And like vile lying
stones in saffroned tinne,” and Van Helmont in 1618 described
the Philosopher’s Stone as “of colour, such as is the Saffron in its
powder, yet weighty, and shining like unto powdered Floss”.) 51
Plinius said the best variety of saffron was that of the crocus of
Kilikia; and Apollonios of Rhodes compared the prometheion
with this flower. 52 Among the juices applied to the surface of
polished metal, beside that of the Kilikian krokos, was that of
grapes, together with elydrion, a yellow dye-stuff. 53 “Make a wash
as usual. Dye the silver out of petals till the colour pleases. If the
petal is bronzen, all the better.” Sometimes krokos may represent
a mineral; we may compare crocus martis , ferric oxide. Pseudo-
Demokritos remarks, “Saffron has the same action as copper.”
Anagallis, generally translated as pimpernel, seems cited by
Demokritos for a yellow dye. Its character for dye-uses is con¬
firmed by its appearance among other materials in a work by
Moses. Demokritos also mentions Pontic rhubarb, rha , as a
material for producing dye-liquor. The root in fact has a deep
yellow colour through its chrysarobin. (Synesios was puzzled by
this passage, thinking that Demokritos intended an analogy
between the river Rha flowing into the Pontic Sea and the
liquefaction of a solid.) 54 A recipe from the Stockholm chemical
papyrus is of interest as using both mercury and poppy-extract:

To make silver: purchase coals such as coppersmiths use and steep
them one day in vinegar. Then take an ounce of copper, fix it well
with alum, and melt in this condition. Then take 8 ounces of mercury
and empty it into poppy-extract. Take also i ounce of silver, and having
incorporated these ingredients together, melt. (Recipe 8).

Incense and resin (called opos, juice) appear in a recipe for auto¬
matic fire to be used in warfare. The text, which cannot be
earlier than 550 a.d., is given in a manuscript of Julius
Africanus:

THE NAME ALCHEMY 85

Automatic fire is made up of equal parts of native sulphur, rocksalt,

1 license, thunderbolt stone of pyrites, ground in a black mortar in the
noon-sun, and mixed with equal parts of the juice of the black sycamore
and liquid asphalt of Zakynthos into a greasy paste. Then some quick¬
lime is added. The mass must be stirred at noon with care and the face
kept protected, as the composition easily enflames. It must be put in
bronze boxes with tight covers, protected from the sun’s rays till
wanted. If the engines of the enemy are to be burned, they are smeared
with it in the evening, and when the sun rises they’ll be burned. 55

The idea of the Elixir is not as strong in Graeco-Roman alchemy
as it is in Arab and Western medieval developments. But it is
present and turns up now and then: for example, “Good prepara-
lion and completion of the Created Thing and of the Work and
hong Duration of Life.” 56

'There is thus no reason why the use of certain plant-juices in
metallurgical craft-magic might not have given the name to
alchemy; but we have no evidence on the philological side for the
early phases of this development. In Arabic, kimiya was used both
lor a substance and for an art. But as it came to be used mainly for
the latter, the synonym iksir was kept for the substance: hence our
elixir from el iksir. In Greek the substance was chymos , with chymia
apparently an abstract formation from it. But there is no sign of
the word chymos having been used for a transformative agent; in
alchemy that role was played by the divine water, mercury, and
so on. Despite the evidence for magical herbs or juices in craft-
ritual, we are then far from being convinced that chymos-chymia
gives us the sequence leading to the term alchemy.

The situation is further complicated by the intrusion of China
into the problem. There the words Huan-Tan and Chin-I were
used for alchemy. Chin -1 or Jin-Yi has been translated “goldfluid,
goldjuice, gold-sperm”, which brings it into line with chymos
rather than chyma. The ILie-sien Yuan (probably written by some
alchemist between a.d. 200-420) tells a tale of how Master Ma
Ming got from the ancient Master An Ch’i the recipe for the
medicine jin-yi , which he compounded on Mt Hua-yin. However,
not wanting to ascend to heaven, he took a half-dose and became
an earthly immortal. The poet Shen Yo (441-513) sang: “I want to
get a tablet with the jin-yi recipe, which will inform me how to
grow wings.” And the T’ang emperors gave the name Jin-Yi
to the audience hall in their main palace The pronunciation of

86 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

of jin-yi in T’ang times would be kPm-iak\ and it is also claimed
that Chin-I in Southern China would be pronounced Kim-Iyah or
Kem-Iyah, the I in lyah meaning fresh plant]uice as well as fluid;
and that therefore the Chinese Chin-I or Jin-Yi is the origin of the
Arabic Kimiyah. Similarly it is claimed the el iksir comes from a
Chinese phrase pronounced iak-ts’i’t in T’ang times—now yi-j^h',
this phrase denoted the substance of a fluid secretion. 57

What are we to make of all this ? There is scant evidence for a
metallurgical type of alchemy in early China, despite the great
importance of the bronze industry. The notion of an elixir
however does seem to go well back into the pre-Christian age.
When we consider the abundance of evidence for metallurgical
alchemy in the Hellenistic world, in an area reaching from
Mesopotamia to Egypt, and when we consider how essential for
the maturing of alchemic theory was the background of Greek
philosophy and mystery-religion, it is incredible that the system
should have been imported from China via India and the pre-
Islamic Arabs. Chymos-chyma , with or without its Egyptian
associations and fusions, lies firmly in the bed of the ancient
Greek language; and it is hard to see what can disturb its claim to
have provided the basis from which the chemeia-chymia of Zosimos
came (about a.d. 300). To suppose that a similarly-sounding
Chinese term, with exactly the same meaning, came into the
Greek-Egyptian spere via Indians and early Arabs is to enter a

9. Travelling merchants in China: three T’ang figurines showing

Semitic, Persian, and Western types

THE NAME ALCHEMY

philological madhouse. There is no space or need here to discuss
1 1 ic early relations of China and the Iranian-Mesopotamian area.

Ihii one example may be cited. About 1,000 b.c. horn-rhytons
were being turned out by Iranian craftsmen; a doe-headed one
appears on a Sassanid silver dish; a Chinese stone-relief of the 6th
i nitury a.d. shows a horn-rhyton of the Iranian type being used.
Trade-relations along the steppe-lands or via South-East Asia
certainly have an indefinitely ancient history.

Not that it is irrelevant for us to explore Indian and Iranian
iullure for plant-lores. Those lores shed light on the general
i >si kg round of alchemic origins. The Indian Buddhist Avatamska
Sutra (dated 2nd to 4th century a.d.) states, “There exists a
1 1 at aka juice or essence. One liang of this solution can transform
.1 1 housand Hangs of bronze into pure gold.” The Mahaprajna-
I'nramitashastra of Nagarjuna (translated into Chinese in the 4th
icnlury) counts among the siddhi or miraculous powers the

I nmsmutation of “stone into gold and gold into stone”. The
(Hinge can be brought about by herbs or by yoga. The
Mnbaprajnaparamitopadesha (translated into Chinese in the early
iill century) says, “By means of drugs and incantations one can
(lunge bronze into gold. By a skilful use of drugs, silver may be
tiansformed into gold and gold into silver. By spiritual strength
nun can change clay or stone into gold.” 58 In the myth of Indra’s
dismemberment the divine body, intoxicated by an excess of

II >ma, began to “flow out”, giving birth to every creature, plant,
and metal. “From his navel the lifebreath flowed out and became
lead, not iron, not silver; from his seed his form flowed out and
became gold.” 69

Albcruni in the nth century stated that the Hindus “have a
la irnce similar to alchemy which is quite peculiar to them. They
call it Rasayana. It means the art which is restricted to certain
1 >pr rations, drugs, compounds, and medicines, most of which are
1 a ken from Plants. Its principles restored the health of those who
were ill beyond hope and gave back youth to fading old age.” A
writer on Cutch in 1839 said that all the folk there “believe in the
possibility of obtaining eternal youth and unwasting riches by
means of the Waters-of-Life (which corresponds with the Persian
iii m Abe-Hayaf) and the Philosopher’s Stone (Hajre Mukurran, a
substance best developed by the Muslim alchemists) and many
Indian works contain grave treatises on the best means of
necking them.” 60 We are told that originally “the term was

88 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

THE NAME ALCHEMY

Ayushyani, or the securing of long life and health, which occurs in
the Atharva-Veda and was converted later into Kasayana which is
practically equivalent to alchemy. Even in the Atharva-Veda gold
is regarded as the elixir-of-life, and thus [that work] can be said to
be the first book of Knowledge of medicine and alchemy in
ancient India.” 61 Kasayana seems at the outset a herbal drug or
elixir; it appears as such in the epic Mahabhurata. Later it came to
mean mercury or a mercurial substance, then alchemy as a whole.
We may thus say in general that in the earlier Indian phases we
find elixirs and herbal substances believed to own immortalising
powers; the aspect of transmutation of metals may come in later
through the Arabs—though there may well have been in India
from the first centuries of metallurgical activity some sort of
primitive alchemy. Much the same picture seems to exist in
China, where the main emphasis is also on the elixir. 62

Indian and Iranian ideas and myths were closely connected. It
is enough for us here to note that fact without entering into the
question of which influenced which, and in what way. We are
concerned with the general way in which the Iranian-Indian
complex lay behind the alchemic world-outlook in Graeco-Roman
days. In Persia the primordial man, Gayomart, murdered by the
corruptor, “allowed his seed to flow over the earth”—just as
Indra did. As his body was composed of metals, the seven basic
kinds thus flowed out. 63 We are also told that at his death eight
minerals came from his limbs: gold, silver, iron, brass, tin, lead,
quicksilver, and diamond. “Gold, in virtue of its perfection,
issued from actual life and from the seed.” 64 The diamond there
seems intrusive. From Gayomart’s seed, purified by the heaven’s
rotation, was born the first human couple in the form of a rhubarb-
plant. 65 Gold and the human essence were thus closely linked.

In Persia the haoma- plant played much the same role as soma in
India. It was an elixir, with a stock epithet: “from whom death
flees”. The haoma rite was the central liturgical act of Zoroastrian¬
ism. The sacrifice was twice performed. At its first preparation it
was accompanied by the offering of sacred bread, which was
ritually consumed. The Haoma Yasht was recited: hymns in
praise of the divine plant. The priests alone drank the sacred
liquid. Then came the profession of faith acknowledging Ahura-
Mazda as the Good Lord. After three most sacred prayers came
the second preparation of haoma , its consecration and consump¬
tion, with the laity now invited to share. The sacrifice of the plant

was an act of communion. The plant itself was identified with the
Son of God, who was bruised and mangled in the mortar so that
(lie lifegiving fluid from his body might give new strength to the
worshipper. (Haoma seems to have been a plant like our rhubarb,
which grows to this day in the Iranian mountains. 66 We have
noted the use of rhubarb with its deep yellow roots in alchemy,
where it had value as a dye giving a golden effect and was thus
considered as owning transmutative powers.) The way in which
mankind and the plant were identified in the processes of juice-
production was exactly paralleled by the way in which mankind
and the metals were identified in the alchemic processes, as we
shall see when we come to the visions of Zosimos.

11 is clear then that ideas of the elixir entered into the myths and
images of metallurgical transmutation in Greece as well as
elsewhere; but without more definite etymological evidence it
would be rash to deprive chemeia-chjmia from chymos rather than
chyma. It is best to suppose that at the early stages there was no
very clear differentiation between juice-extraction and smelting or
alloying. That is, all the processes were felt to have deep-going
analogies which made them in the last resort expressions of a
iransmutative process. That was how chymos , chylos, and chyma all
emerged from the root shown in cheein, “to pour out”. In later
stages the notion of the unity in the processes weakened, but was
never obliterated. Ideas and imagery from plant-magic flowed in
on those from metallurgical craft-magic, and vice versa. Probably
1 be metallurgical chyma dominated in the formation of the general
term chemeia-chymia for chemical activity, plus influences from the
I '.gyptian km. That seems as far as we can go in unravelling this
difficult etymological knot—the very difficulty of which, however,
enables us to penetrate into the complex origins of alchemic ideas
and practices.

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

9 1

I'.pibechios, Pelagios, Agathodaimon, the emperor Heraklios, Theo-
phrastos, Archelaos, Petasios, Klaudianos, Anon, Menos, Panseris,
Sergios. These are the Master everywhere famed and oecumenical,
llie new Commentators on Plato and Aristode. The Places where the
divine work is accomplished are Egypt, Thrace [? Byzantion], Alex¬
andria, Cypros, and the Temple of Memphis. 3

Demokritos and Bolos of Mendes

Now we come to the alchemists themselves. If we look at the
manuscripts, we find them lavish with names, but with no
historical reliability.

Exposition of the Rules of Goldmaking, beginning with the names of
the exponents. Hermes Trismegistos wrote first on the Great Mystery.
He was followed by Johannes, Archpriest of Tuthia in Euagia and
the sanctuaries there found. Demokritos, the celebrated philosopher of
Abdera, spoke after them as well as the excellent prophets following.
Then the very wise Zosimos is named. These are the oecumenical and
famed philosophers, the commentators of the theories of Plato and
Aristode. Olympiodoros and Stephanos, having made researches and
discoveries, wrote great accounts of the goldmaking art. Such were
the very wise books, the authority of which is going to guide us. 1

Omitting Hermes and Johannes, this account is fairly sober. But
we also get hasty fists:

Names of the Philosophers of the Sacred Science and Art. These are:
Moses, Demokritos, Synesios, Paseris, Pebichios, Xenokrates, Afri-
kanos, Loukas, Diogenes, Hippasos, Stephanos, Chimes, the Christian,
Maria, Petasios, Hermes, Theosebeia, Agathodamion, Theophilos,
Isidoros, Thales, Herakleitos, Zosimos, Philaretes, Juliana, Sergios. 2

The manuscript must date from long after the temple of Sarapis
had been razed and that of Memphis also destroyed; but it
repeats ancient traditions. To claim Plato and Aristotle as
ancestors was not altogether untrue; for many aspects of the
alchemic cosmogony went back to their work. In joining Hermes
< >r Orpheus with famous Greek thinkers or poets (Hesiod, Aratos)
die compilers were probably expressing a genuine confusion in
part, in part seeking to raise the prestige of their art. Such
agglomerations were not unusual at the time. The Sethean
(inostics mingled Biblical themes with Orphic mysteries. Further,
no one wanted to claim originality. The more one could shelter
behind the great names, the safer one felt. Whereas apologists
today seek to stress the new elements in the Christian dispensation,
a writer like Eusebios in the 4th century a.d. goes out of his way
lo insist that there is nothing new whatever in it:

This must suffice as introduction to my story proper. It was necessary
i 11 order to guard against any inclination to think of our Saviour and
I ,otd, Jesus Christ, as novel, because of the date of his sojourn in the
llcsh. But to prevent anyone from imagining that his teaching was
cither new and strange, as being put together by a man of recent date,
110 different from his fellows, let us now deal briefly with this point. . .

Thus the practice of religion as communicated to us by Christ’s
(caching is shown to be not modern and strange, but, in all conscience,
primitive, unique, and true. 4

Here Hermes is relegated low down in the fist and Moses is the
great founder leading on to Demokritos, with famous early Greek
thinkers like Thales and Herakleitos in the tale. In yet another
fist Plato and Aristotle lead on to Hermes, Johannes and
Demokritos.

Plato and Aristode, Hermes, Johannes the Archpriest in divine
Euagria, Demokritos, the great Zosimos, Olympiodoros, Stephanos
the Philosopher, Sophar the Persian, Synesios, Dioskoros the priest
of great Sarapis at Alexandreia, Ostanes and Komarios initiates of

Egypt, Maria, Kleopatra, wife of King Ptolemaios [XII] Porphyrios,

Wc cannot do better than begin our quest by considering the role
of Demokritos in the alchemic tradition. There, what are called
ihc works of Demokritos seem almost wholly the products of
I !< >los of Mendes; but there could not have been such a use of a
great philosopher’s name unless he was felt to have some close
affinity with the alchemic worldview. We have already had some
gjimpses of Bolos-Demokritos from the pages of Columella and
I’linius; and at times in the stories that are told, and the
attributions that are made, it is hard to be sure whether we are
dealing with Bolos or the 5th-century philosopher.

92 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Today Demokritos is mainly recalled as the founder, with
Leukippos, of the atomic theory. According to this theory all
bodies are made of atoms, which are complete, indivisible,
simple, eternally existent in empty space, but differing in form and
magnitude, with proportional weight. All change comes through
combinations or dissociations of atoms in a purely mechanical
way. If we think we see a distant action, there in an intermediate
medium transmitting it. Atoms are caught in a w hirling move¬
ment, which brings about their combinations. The soul is made of
round tenuous atoms of the igneous kind; they keep on trying to
escape, but breathing renews their number. Sensations imply a
direct contact with objects or their emanadons. All this (apart
from the role of breathing and the concept of ceaseless movement)
seems very far from alchemy, which, perhaps on account of the
difficulties of finding ways to weigh atoms, never made any attempt
to apply or develop the atomic theory in dealing with its problems.

But Demokritos was interested in much more than atoms. The
works that he or his school wrote formed a sort of encyclopedia
analogous to the collection of treatises under the name of Aris¬
totle. They were classified and gathered together by the
grammarian and astrologer Thrasyllos under whom Tiberius
studied at Rhodes and who accompanied his master to Rome. He
is named in Juvenal’s sixth satire, just before Petosiris. Now only
a few fragments of the collection survive. But we are told that its
contents included works on ethics, natural science, mathematics,
astronomy, music, poetry, rhythm and poetic beauty, Plomer,
linguistics and grammar, medicine, agriculture, painting, myth¬
ology, history. Diogenes Laertes mentions works on the sap or
juice of plants, as does Petronius; on stones, minerals, colours,
metals, glass-tinting. Anecdotes describe Demokritos’ incredible
diligence, and he is said to have died in poverty. Diogenes says
that he was esteemed, not only for philosophy, “but because he
had foretold some things that the events proved to be true,” and
adds that he died at the age of 109. He was called the Smiling
Philosopher, laughing at the follies of men; his aim was euthymia
or peace of mind through abstinence and moderation. Plinius
says, “Demokritos condemned Venus as the act by which one
human being springs from another.” 6

Legends seem to have gathered fairly soon around him, so that it
is hard to say where the fantasies about the atomist end and begin
to merge with the fantasies about the alchemist. He belonged to

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

Abdera, an Ionian colony from Teos founded in the 5 th century
11.c. But we also find him called a Milesian and his father’s name
is variously spelt. He travelled widely and was thought to have
reached even India and Aithiopia; he wrote of Babylon and
Meroe . 6 Diodoros says that the Egyptians asserted that “Demo¬
kritos also [as well as Pythagoras] spent five years among them
and was instructed in many matters relating to astrology.”
Diogenes, perhaps basing himself on Antisthenes (almost a
contemporary of Demokritos), says that he learned geometry
from the priests of Egypt and visited Persia and the Red Sea.
Thcophrastos mentions him as a man who had visited many
countries; and according to Clement he declared that no man of
bis age had made greater journeys or met more men distinguished
in every kind of knowledge, mages and priests. Among the
latter he cited the Egyptian geometers, arpedonaptai . 1

It is certain then that he was an adventurous and striking
( haracter; of the sort likely to attract legends; and presumably it
was his interest in stones, minerals, colours, dyes, that in large
part drew the alchemists to him. A citation by Theophrastos
shows him interested in fire and colour. “Iron and other bodies
a rc brighter when they contain more fire of higher tenuity, and
arc redder when they contain little fire in a coarser state. Thus,
redder bodies are less hot.” He seems to be establishing a relation
be l ween colour and temperature . 8 Theophrastos himself was much
( oncerned with metals, stones, plants, and perfumes; but he was
never claimed by the alchemic tradition.

Wc can read Demokritos’ bold and untrammelled character in
various sayings of his which have come down and which seem
authentic.

Man must know that he is far removed from how things really are.

A nd it will be clear that it is most difficult to know how each thing
is in reality.

As things stand, we perceive nothing that is reliable, but only
what changes according to our constitution and to the onrushing or
counteracting patterns.

I alone know that I know nothing.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Culture is an adornment for the fortunate and a refuge for the
unfortunate.

To a wise man the whole earth is open; for the native land of a good

•a 1111 is the whole earth.

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

94 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

Poverty under democracy is as much to be preferred to so-called
prosperity under an autocracy as freedom to slavery.

People are fools who hate life and yet wish to live through fear of
Hades.

One must not respect the opinion of other men more than one’s
own; nor must one be more ready to do wrong if no one will know
than if all will know. One must respect one’s own opinion most, and
this must stand as the law of one’s soul, preventing one from doing
anything improper.

A year without feasts is like a long road without inns.

Man is a universe in little.

Nature and instruction are similar; for instruction transforms the
man, and in transforming, creates his nature.

Aristotle was outraged at the way in which Pythagoreans and
Demokritos were obsessed with mathematical combinations or
with “the concurrence and entanglement” of bodies. “They say
there is always movement. But why and what this movement is
they do not say, nor, if the world moves in this way or that, nor do
they tell us the cause of it doing so.”

Now let us look at some of the things that Plinius says about
Demokritos, and find if we can distinguish legend from fact. Thus,
we are told that Pythagoras, Empedokles, Demokritos, Plato,
went overseas to learn the magian lores.

Democritus expounded Apollobechis the Coptite [of Koptos] and
Dardanus the Phoenician, entering the latter’s tomb to obtain his
works and basing his own on his doctrines. That these were accepted
by any human beings and transmitted by memory is the most extra¬
ordinary thing in history, so utterly do they lack credibility and decency
that those who like the other works of Democritus deny that the
magical books are his. But it is all to no purpose. It is certain that
Democritus in particular distilled into men’s minds the sweets of
magic. Another strange thing is that both the arts of medicine and
magic flourished together, Democritus expounding magic in the same
age as Hippocrates medicine. 9

Loukian further colours the tradition of tomb-frequenting. In
his Lie-Lover he writes on the subject of ghosts:

“A very wonderful man that Demokritos,” said I, “the Abderite, who
it seems was completely convinced that nothing of the sort can exist.
He shut himself up in a tomb outside the gates and continually wrote

and composed there night and day. Some of the young chaps, wanting

to annoy and alarm him, dressed up like dead men in black robes and
skull-patterned masks, encircled him, and danced round and round in
quick time, leaping into the air. Yet he neither feared the travesty nor
looked up at them at all, but as he wrote he said, ‘Stop your fooling!’
So firmly did he believe that souls are nothing after they have gone
out of their bodies.” 10

What lies behind these tales appears to be some experiments that
I icmokritos made on what he called eidola : images (a term also used
lor ghosts). Ploutarch tells us that like Epikouros he explained
dreams as the result in general of eidola which were ceaselessly
emitted by objects of all sorts, including living bodies, and which
penetrated through the pores of the sleeper. Demokritos (though
not Epikouros) considered that the eidola carried representations,
emphaseis, of the mental activities, thoughts, characters, emotions
of the person from whom they came. “And, thus charged, they
have the effect of living agents. By their impact they communicate
and transmit to the recipients the opinions, thoughts, and
impulses of their senders, when they reach their goal with the
images intact and undistorted.” Distortions or weakness of
impact could arise through the weather, through frequency of
emission, or through the initial velocity. “Those that spring out
I r< >m persons in an excited and inflamed condition yield, owing to
i heir high frequency and rapid transit, particularly vivid and
significant representations.” 11

ln this passage Ploutarch deals only with dreams; but Demo¬
kritos certainly thought that the eidola could impact on others than
sleepers; for elsewhere Ploutarch mentions that he explained the
evil-eye on the same principle. The sender used eidola charged
with a hostile and harmful content. 12 So it seems that the emission

eidola was a continuous process, which under certain conditions
could assume a special strength and velocity. Apparently then
1 Icmokritos went to tombs or deserted places to try out the effects
o ieidola there on his mind and senses. Diogenes Laertes says: “He
would train himself, asserts Antisthenes, by a variety of means to
lest his sense-impressions by going at times into solitude and
frequenting tombs.” 13 We see then that, though a consistent
materialist, he was extremely interested in strange phenomena,
in occult forces, which he believed had a physical or scientific
explanation if enough was known about them. Probably indeed
n was tins mixture of attitudes that drew the alchemists to him—
.m ardent quest for definite explanations, and an open mind

C)6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

towards forces of sympathy and antipathy, attraction and repul¬
sion, which acted at a distance and could not yet be explained:
together with an omnivorous curiosity and persistence of research.

The tales in Plinius and Loukian, it then appears, have a certain
connection with the historical Demokritos; yet they contain
legendary elements such as we shall find when we discuss
Dardanos and Apollobechis. Why did such legends thicken
round Demokritos? And what were the stages by which they
arose? It is hardly enough to say that they were created after
Demokritos has been taken over as a hero or a disguise by the
alchemists. Plinius is completely convinced that the atomic
philosopher was a thorough-going devotee of magian ideas and
practices; and he is not so uncritical as to be thus taken in unless
there had been a long accumulation of legendary confusions. No
doubt the core of those confusions lay in the work of Bolos of
Mendes. What then of this man, who took the name of Demo-
kritean and also was either mistaken for Demokritos or else hid
himself behind that philosopher’s name—in homage or in an
alchemic system of secrecy? The Byzantine dictionary called the
Souda tries to distinguish two men called Bolos, one a Pythagorean
concerned with sympathies and antipathies, the other a Demo-
kritean, who wrote on medicine and history. But this is unlikely.
Columella seems to know only one Bolos; and Stephanos of
Byzantion, dealing with Apsynthios, a town in Thrace, adds that
Bolos the Demokritean cited Theophrastos’ Book of Plants for the
statement that “the cattle in Pontos cropping a plant with the
same name lack galls”. Columella says that Bolos wrote on
sympathies and antipathies, and calls his books cheiroktnela. 14
Vitruvius, dealing with methods of distinguishing silver mixed
with gold, adduces Archimedes’ experiment with the displacement
of water and Eratosthenes’ method for calculating twice the
cubic content of Apollo’s altar at Delos. He speaks of the pleasure
to be got from considering such inventions, and remarks that he
cannot help admiring “the works of Demokritos on the Nature of
Things and his Commentary entitled Cheirokmeta, wherein he
sealed with a ring, on red wax, the accounts of those experiments
he had tried out”. 15 Cheirokmeta , however, seems to mean
artificial substances : that is the meaning we find for cheirokmetos
in Aristotle—and so the attempt to link it with hand-sealing is an
error. It seems indeed from the letter from Zosimos to his sister
cited earlier that cheirokmeta had a special meaning for alchemists.

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

Zosimos calls his fellows “those who give themselves up to the
i|uest for la cheirokmeta ”—metals produced by the art, not those
just dug up from the earth. But we are still left with the problem
whether both Demokritos and Bolos wrote works with this title,
or whether Vitruvius is confounding Bolos with Demokritos. 16

Now let us look at Plinius on the author of a book about plants,
whom he considers Demokritos. This author he consistently links
with the mages of Persia. In a section on Wonder-Plants, he says
that he will start with the Magical. “They were first brought to
i he notice of our part of the world by Pythagoras and Democritus,
who followed the Magi as their authority.” He goes on about two
plants that Democritus says congeal water, another used in
fomentation against snakebite, and a root that catches fire at a
distance like naphtha. 17

That Democritus was the author of a book called Cheirokmeta is a well-
uttcsted tradition. Yet in it this famous scientist, the keenest student
next to Pythagoras of the Magi, has told us of far more marvellous
phenomena. Thus, the plant aglaophotis [brightlight ? peony], which
g< >t its name from men’s wonder at his magnificent colour, being native
11 > the marble quarries of Arabia on the Persian side, is called marmaritis.
The mages use it when they want to call up gods.

The achaemenis is of an amber colour, leafless, found among the
Taradastili of India; criminals, on drinking it in wine, confess all their
misdeeds because they suffer tortures from divers phantoms of spirits
that haunt them; Democritus also called it hippophobas since mares
have an extreme aversion from it.

Yheombroton [godfood] grows 30 schoeni [each about 5 miles] from
the Choaspes, like a peacock in its hues and very finely-scented. He
says the Persian kings take it in drink for all their bodily disorders as
well as for instability of intellect and of the sense of justice (?); and
that it is also called semnion [solemn, august] from the majesty of its
power.

I le also mentions another plant, the adamantis [unbreakable], native
of Armenia and Cappadocia; if set near lions, they lie on their backs
and wearily yawn. The reason for the name is that the plant cannot
lie crushed. Ariana is named as home of the arianis, a fire-coloured
plant; it is gathered when the sun is in the Lion and pieces of oil-
ttoaked wood catch fire at its touch. The therionarca [beast-numbing],
growing in Cappadocia and Mysia, makes all wild beasts turn torpid
ho that they can’t be revived unless sprinkled with hyena-piss. The
aethiopis grows in Meroe, so its other name is Merois. It has the leaf of
a lettuce and is very good for dropsy if taken in honeywine.

98 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The plants here cited do indeed show a strong Persian aspect, in
their names, places of origin, and magical uses. Note how man y
are connected with some sort of possession. The way in which
names beginning with A and TH dominate suggest that he was
glancing at the start of a work with the items alphabetically
arranged. The aglaophotis, we may note, is a flower of the storm¬
raising and maddening series to which the prometbeion and the
mandragora belonged. 18 Fire-elements appear in the inflammable
root and in arianis. Plinius goes on, using indirect speech to make
clear he is citing his author and taking no responsibility for the
statements.

The ophiusa [snakeplant] grows in Elephantine, also part of Ethiopia,
a plant livid in colour and revolting to look at. Taken in drink, it
causes such terrible visions of menacing serpents that fear of them
drives men to suicide. So those guilty of sacrilege are forced to drink
it. Palmwine is an antidote. The thalassaegle [seabright] is found along
the river Indus and is so called from potamaugis [rivergleam]. Drunk,
it makes men rave while weird visions beset their minds. Theangelis
[godmessenger ?] grows on Mt. Lebanon in Syria, Mt. Dicte in Crete,
and Babylon and Susa in Persia; the mages take it to drink so as to
become divine.

Gelotophyllis [laughterleaved] grows in Bactria and along the
Borysthenes. Taken in myrrh and wine, it makes all sorts of phantoms
haunt the drinker, provoking laughter that keeps on till pinenut
kernels are taken with pepper and honey in palmwine. Hestiateris
[hearthplant] is Persian, so named from its promotion of goodfellow-
ship, as it makes the company gay; it is also called protomedia [Median
headship] from its use to gain the highest position at Court; casignete
[sisterplant] as it grows only in companionship with its own species
and not with any other plants. Helianthes [sunflower] is the name of a
plant with myrtle-like leaves, growing in the district of Themiscyra
and on the mountains along the Cilician coast. A decoction of it in
lionfat, with saffron and palmwine added, is used as ointment by the
mages and by the Persian king to give the body a pleasing look;
hence its name heliocallis [sunbeauty].

He gives the name of hermesias to an agent for procreating handsome
and good children. This isn’t a plant but a compound of ground
kernels of pinenuts with honey, myrrh, saffron, and palmwine, and
with the later addition of theombroton and milk. He prescribes a draught
of it for those about to become parents, after conception, and to nursing
mothers; thus are born children excelling in mind and body as well as
good. Of all these plants he adds also the magical names. 19

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

Elsewhere he link s Demokritos and Pythagoras. The latter, he
says, first composed a book on plants, assigning his discoveries to
Apollo, Aesculapius (Asklepios), and other gods.

Democritus composed a similar work. Both men visited the Mages of
Persia, Arabia, Ethiopia, and Egypt; and so amazed were the ancients
at these books that they positively made even incredible statements.
Xanthos, historian, relates in his first book that a young snake, killed,
was restored by its father, using a plant that Xanthos calls balls, and
that the same plant revived Tylo, whom the snake had killed. Juba
too records the resurrection of a man in Arabia through a plant.
Democritus stated, and Theophrastus credited him, that there was a
plant, which, carried by a bird I have mentioned, forced out by its
touch a wedge driven into a tree by shepherds. 20

I Ic adds that “most authorities hold there is nothing that cannot
lie achieved by the power of plants, but the properties of most are
still unknown”. Tylon is a divine youth and reminds us of the
(: re tan Glaukos, son of Minos, who was similarly healed by a
herb that a snake had used. There are strong traces of initiation-
ritual and myth in these tales. Plinius is fiercely anti-magian and
never loses a chance to stress how fantastic or repulsive is magian
magic. We shall hear more of what he has to say on the subject
when we come to Ostanes. 21 For the moment here is what he says
of Asklepiades of Bithynia, who came to Rome early in last
century b.c. “Above all he was helped by magian deceits, which
prevailed to such a degree that they were strong enough to
destroy confidence in all herbal remedies. It was believed that the
plant aethiopis dries up rivers and pools; that onothuris opens
anything shut; that achaemenis, thrown into the ranks of an enemy,
makes their lines turn their backs in panic.” Two of these herbs
are among those of whom Demokritos wrote. 22

Bolos then seems to be shown as earlier than Asklepiades; and
we may add that he seems earlier than Anaxilaos of Larissa, who is
mentioned in the Stockholm papyrus and who flourished about
28 B.C.

Another recipe: Anaxilaos relates this also to Demokritos: Pound some
common salt into a fine powder together with schistose alum, with
acid, make pellets of it. Let them dry three days in a bathroom. Then
pound them afresh, fuse copper with this powder, three times, and
cool and refresh it with seawater. The trial will bring out the quality
of the product.

IOI

IOO ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

There were several other writers on plants. Bolos may have used
plant-material in apocryphal works under the name of Zoroaster
Ostanes, and other mages. Then there was Pamphilos of Alex-
andreia (ist century a.d.) with a Peri Botanon in six books, which
Galen tells us, gave the incantations to be spoken when gathering
herbs; it also indicated the use to be made of talismans, libations
and fumigations in dealing with plants. 23

But though Bolos was clearly much interested in plant-magic,
his main claim to fame lies in his position as the founder of
alchemy. He must have drawn together the many allied strands of
thought and practice concerned with transformative processes,
and given them a unity which they had not previously attained!
But exactly what that unity was, and how far he developed the
theory of alchemy, it is hard to determine. Presumably his main
alchemic work lies behind the Physika andMystika, which survives
only in fragmentary form in the MSS. 2 * Let us consider its
contents. It opens flatly with two recipes for purple dyeing. Then
comes a passage more suitable for a preface, in which Demokritos
invokes the shade of Ostanes. After that we get ten goldmaking
recipes, a short polemic against the “young” (neoi) who won’t
beheve in the virtue of the art. The polemic, addressed to the
colleagues, symprophetai , of the writer, makes a sort of conclusion.

There then is enough said on the dry tinctures and on the
attention that should be paid to the scripture.” It is followed,
however, by three goldmaking recipes, of which the last is
addressed to Pammenes, who has taught the Egyptian priests.

it is up to this point, that in the Physika the matter of gold¬
making goes.” 25 Then comes a theoretical statement, that a single
species suffices for the production of a multitude of effects. We
pass on to silvermaking, which ends the manuscript. Nothing is
said of tinting precious stones. (The title Physika and Mystika
cannot be simply translated Physical and Mystical Matters ; for
physika here refers to the hidden forces in nature. It is equivalent
to physikai dynameis, with special reference to sympathies and
antipathies. The aner physikos was the man who in the hellenistic
epoch was learned in occult relationships and forces; he was a
mage. 26 Bolos seems to have founded the genre of Physika.)

The complete text was much larger than our fragments.
Synesios in the 4 th century states: “After getting his impetus
from Ostanes, Demokritos composed Four Books on Tinctures,
bibloi baphikai, on gold, silver, stones, purple.” 27 The same

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

position is implied by the title of a treatise that Demokritos is
said to address to Leukippos: “Fifth Book of Demokritos.” 28
(I i is odd that the alchemists, who do not try to make use of the
atomic theory, thus go out of their way to link their Demokritos
with the other atomic philosopher. Bolos-Demokritos says to
Leukippos: “I have made use of enigmas, but they won’t hold
you up, you physical scientist who know all things.”) There are
also some indications in the diction of the MS that the compiler
was working under the empire. The work klaudianos is used to
denote a substance that seems a mineral, not an alloy; but what¬
ever the material, the term can hardly be earlier than the reign of
(laudius. 29 (An alchemist Klaudianos appears in a list of gold-
makers; and we meet a moonbook of Klaudianos in a magic
papyrus.) 30 Further a plant laccha is cited, the roots of which
serve for tinting in red. Normally this plant is called anchonsa.

[ I.accha is a term borrowed from India, and is not found again till
ilie 8th century ( lacca ). Presumably it had come in through the
trade-links with India in the ist and 2nd centuries a.d., which
were responsible for the statuette of the goddess Lakshmi found
at Pompeii. 31

We may add the point that the compiler already feels a conflict
between the old and the new schools of alchemy. The young
school is rejecting a manual that has become sacred to the

11. Urt-hekau, the Cobra goddess of magical spells

102 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

traditionalists; and we can only assume that the manual in
question was the original and complete work of Bolos.

Somehow that manual seems to have been lost and its place
taken by the fragmentary Phjsika and Mjstika , which all the later
alchemists know and cite, and which itself cites only one Egyptian
worker in the art, Pammenes, together with the mage Ostanes. It
is surprising that there is no reference to Hermes, Agathodaimon,
Isis, Kleopatra, or Maria. \\ e assume that the author uses works
written under the names of Ostanes, but knows none of the many
treatises composed in the first couple of centuries a.d.

Bolos-Demokritos tells us at the outset that he came to Egypt
to teach ta phjsika though our text keeps only a displaced
fragment of this preamble, “Yes, I too came to Egypt. I brought
with me the lore of occult virtues, so that you might rise above
multiple [diffused] curiosity and confused materials [or matter],
hyle”. Then after dealing with the phjsika revealed by the
philosophy (alchemy) he recounts:

After learning these things from the master named Ostanes and aware
of the diversity of the matter, I set myself to make the combination of
natures. But, as our master had died before our initiation was completed
and we were still all taken up in learning the matter, it was from Hades,
as one says, that I tried to evoke him. I applied myself to the task, and’
as soon as he appeared, I apostrophised him in these terms, “Are you
going to give me nothing in return for what I have done for you?”

I spoke in vain. He kept silent.

However when I addressed him as well I could and asked him how
I should combine the natures, he told me that it was difficult for him
to speak; the daimon wouldn’t allow it. He said only, “The books are
in the temple.”

Turning back, I then went to make searches in the temple on the
chance of being able to lay my hands on the books. For he had said
nothing about them while alive and he had died intestate—according
to some, through using a poison to separate soul from body; according
to his son, through swallowing a poison by mistake. And he had taken
precautions before dying that no one should know of the books except
his son on reaching maturity. So none of us knew anything of the
matter.

But despite all our searching we found nothing; and so we gave
ourselves a terrible lot of trouble in trying to learn how substances
and natures were united and combined in a single substance. Well,
when we had realised the synthesis of matter, some time passed by and

a festival was held in the temple. We took part, all of us, in a banquet.

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES I03

Then, as we were in the temple, all of a sudden a column of its own
accord opened up in the middle. But at first glance there seemed nothing
inside. However [the son] Ostanes told us that it was in this column
his father’s books had been placed. And, taking charge of the situation,
he brought the thing out into the open. But when we bent to look, we
saw in surprise that nothing had escaped us except this wholly valuable
formula which we found there. “A nature is delighted by another
nature, a nature conquers another nature, a nature dominate another
nature.” Great was our admiration for the way he had concentrated
in a few words all the Scripture. 32

I Ic seems to mean that the text had escaped their notice when they
first looked into the column; but he may mean that it summarised
1 he final clarification of the art, which had evaded them in their
own studies. The account is typical of the quests for knowledge
of the later Hellenistic and Roman periods. The seeker is
passionately devoted to the search for the truth—the particular
sphere of knowledge which for him sums up all truth and assures
bis salvation; he feels sure that he cannot attain his goal by his
own resources, he needs some revelation from on high; so he
manages to conjure up a god or a divine master; he finds in some
temple a stele on which a secret is inscribed. Commonly, esoteric
lore is handed on only to a son. How deeply the idea of an urgent
need to seek and find had gone into the people of this world we
may judge by two sayings attributed to Jesus. “Wherever there
are . . . and there is one . . . alone, I am with him. Raise the stone
and there you will find me, cleave the wood and there am I.”
A nd, “Let not him who seeks . . . cease until he finds, and when
lie finds he will be astonished. Astonished he will reach the
kingdom, and having reached the kingdom he will rest.” A deep
inner disquiet drove these people on.

The author of Poimandres tells us of the after-effects of such a
vision as this of Bolos-Demokritos:

And I began to preach to men the beauty of piety and knowledge:
“O people, men bom of the earth, you who have given yourselves
up to drunkenness, sleep, and ignorance of God, be abstemious, cease
to wallow in debauchery, spelled as you are by brutish sleep.”

And when they had heard, they came to me with one accord, and I
said: “Why, O men born of the earth, have you delivered yourselves
up to death when you have the power of sharing in immortality ? Turn
to repentance, you who taken the way of error and had ignorance for
companion. Free yourself from the dark light, take part in immortality,
leaving perdition behind you once for all.”

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

104 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

■ . . And I sowed in them the words of wisdom and they were
nourished with the water of ambrosia. The dusk came and the light
of the sun had begun quite to disappear. I invited them to give thanks
to God. And when they had completed the offering of thanks, each
fell asleep on his couch.

As for me, I engraved on myself the benefaction of Poimandres,
and after being thus filled full of what I desired, I felt an extreme joy.
For in me the sleep of the body had become a sober vigil of the soul,
the closing of the eyes a veritable vision, my silence a pregnancy of
good, and the utterance of the word a bringing-forth of good things. 33

12. Cobra-goddesses of Lower and Upper Egypt

Bolos-Demokritos as an alchemist cannot preach in public, but
he can and must do his best to spread the glad tidings among
those vowed to the sacred art. Bolos says, “I came to Egypt.” The
prophet of Poimandres says, “I have come, filled with the breath
of truth.” The password for the order of pneumatikoi among the
followers of the Gnostic Markos was “I have come.” Jesus says,
“I have come that they might have life.” 34 The great alchemic
formula which Bolos sets out was almost certainly taken from one
of the works to which the names of Ostanes had been attached in
the Hellenistic period. Synesios says, “This Ostanes is he who
first gave the formula: a nature <&c.” The commentator called the
Christian remarks, “A nature ebv., as Demokritos and his master
Ostanes have said.” We noted how the formula was cited by
Nechepso-Petosiris. Bolos uses it as a sort of refrain, repeating it
at the end of each of his three recipes for making gold by means of
liquids, washes, sfmoi. It appears similarly in the silvermaking
recipes and it turns up again in the theoretical or doctrinal
passages that surround the recipes. In the first section after the
goldmaking recipes it takes the following form: “O natures that

105

produce natures, O natures wholly great that by your changes
conquer natures, O natures that beyond nature delight natures.”
Amid the polemic against the young we find: “In effect they do
not know the antipathies of natures, how a single kind destroys
ten others; for a single drop of oil can efface a great deal of purple,
a little sulphur can burn many kinds.” And at the end of the
goldmaking part: “What need have we of the coming-together of
many kinds since a single nature suffices to conquer the All.” 35

We may assume that the pervasive use of this refrain in Phjsika
and Mystika goes back to the original work of Bolos. Indeed it
seems plausible that it summed up and expressed the new element
be brought into the field of treatises on dyeing and tinting. No
doubt he drew on Mazdean and Stoic sources for the idea and its
formulation; what was new was his more specific application of it
to a series of processes which had previously been treated in a
more or less pragmatic way. A late commentator thus sums up
the issue of sympathy-antipathy in alchemy and looks back to
“Demokritos” for the concise formulation:

And so, by necessity, we must first learn the natures, the genus, the
kinds, the affinities, the sympathies and the antipathies, the mixtures
and the separations, the loves and hates, the aversions and all analogous
diings, and by this means arrive at the composition that we want to
bring about, as the excellent Demokritos sets it out in short.

In effect, we must not ignore the fact that it is by virtue of a natural
sympathy that the magnet draws the iron to itself, by virtue of a
natural antipathy that garlic, rubbed on the magnet, takes away its
natural property. In the same way again, if there is a mixture made by
pouring water into wine and a separation made by oil poured into
water, we must not neglect the things that come together by reason of
a natural sympathy and we must at the same time take note of those
that oppose one another through antipathy.

Thus it is by reason of a natural sympathy and a substantial affinity
that certain liquids mix together and amicably unite their substances,
delight one another, and maintain themselves in this state of coexis¬
tence, which is proper to them, while others oppose one another and
separate out by reason of an antipathy, a hate, an aversion. 36

The tale of Demokritos and the ghost of Ostanes travelled far and
long. In the Book of Prates, a Greek text that survives in an Arab
version, an angel appears to the narrator:

“Have I not told you,” he replied to me, “that the master of Demo¬
kritos had not taught him the combination of matters and had left

Io6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

him in a painful doubt about it. So Demokritos had to study books,
make researches, multiply experiences and informations, and undergo
serious mortifications, before arriving at the right way. According to
what he tells, he found nothing so difficult as the obtaining of the
intimate mixture needed for realising the combination of matters .. .” 37

Another Arab text displaces Demokritos:

The Sage [here Balinos: Apollonios of Tyana] said: “Nature grasps
Nature, Nature conquers Nature, and Nature rejoices in Nature.”
Consider the wisdom of this Sage, how he gathered in a few words so
much knowledge; for he means by this three marriages between
Males and Females:.. , 38

We noted above the legendary links of Demokritos with Dardanos
and Apollobeches (Apollobex). Dardanos is not the Greek hero,
who among other things was a mythical ancestor of the Trojans. 3 ®
He represents Phoenikian, anti-Jewish magic, and was the rival
of King Solomon. 40

And Solomon’s wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the
east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt. For he was wiser than all
men; than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, and Chalcol, and Darda,
the sons of Mahol; and his fame was in all nations round about, (i
Kings iv 31.)

Here again we meet the rivalry of Egyptians and Jews in matters
of wisdom and magic. Josephos adds to Kings:

He spoke a parable upon every sort of tree, from the hyssop to the
cedar; and in like manner about beasts, about all sorts of living creatures,
on the earth, in the seas, or in the air; for he was not unacquainted
with any of their natures, nor omitted inquiries about them, but
described them all like a philosopher and demonstrated his exquisite
knowledge of their several properties. God also enabled him to learn
that skill which expels demons, a science useful and healthgiving to
men. He composed such incantations also as alleviate distempers.
And he left behind him the manner of using exorcisms to drive away
demons and prevent them from returning; and his way of cure is of
great force to this day. I’ve seen a man of my country, Eleazar, free
people that were possessed, in the presence of Vespasian, his sons, his
captains and a whole host of soldiers.

Eleazar put to the man’s nostrils a ring with a root in it, and drew
the demon out; then bade the demon overturn a basin of water

set some distance away, to prove that he had left the man’s body.

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES I07

We have a lovecharm. The Sword of Dardanos, of which we shall
filer have more to say. Columella speaks of Dardanos as if he
dealt in the sort of spells that we have seen attached to Bolos-
1 iemokritos; he is dealing with ways of banishing caterpillars:

But if no medicine can the pest repel.

Let the Dardanian Arts be called to quell. 41

A girl at her first menstruation is led with bare feet and breasts,
and with hair loose, thrice round the beds and garden-hedge. “To
earth at once in twisted shapes the caterpillars roll.” Apuleius,
denying the charge of magical practices, declares, “If you can
prove that I thus got the least bit of gain, then may I be held a
Phrynondas [? Carmendas], a Damigeron, a Moses, an Iannes, an
Apollonios, or even Dardanos himself, or anyone else who,
since the days of Zoroaster and Ostanes, has been famous among
magicians.”

The themes of books-in-a-tomb became so attached to Demo¬
kritos that we find in a Latin MS of the 9th century (from St
Gall): “he wrote [a work] on ivory tablets and ordered it to be put
in his own tomb.” 43 As for Apollobex, he seems the same as the
l’ibechios who appears in alchemical MSS, who writes to Osron
asking for the Divine Books of Ostanes, or who deals with
yellowing substances without whitening. 43

Before we end this chapter we shall glance at some more tales
about sacred lore found on stelai or pillars. Such tales help us to
enter into the minds of the men of these times, with their ceaseless
quest for revelation and for lost secrets. Manethds speaks of the
mysterious stelai of all-knowing Hermes. Iamblichos says: “If
you propose some difficulty in philosophy, we’ll settle it according
to the ancient stelai of Hermes that Plato and Pythagoras read in
entirety and from which they constituted their philosophy.”
Olympiodoros says the secrets of the mystic art are inscribed on
the obelisks in hieroglyphs. 44 Josephos tells us of Seth’s children:

They were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom that is con¬
cerned with the heavenly bodies and their order. And that their
inventions might not be lost before they were enough known, on
Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by
the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and mass of water,
they made two pillars: one of brick, the other of stone. They inscribed
their discoveries on them both so that if the brick pillar was destroyed
by the flood, the stone pillar might remain . . . 45

108 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Joscphos said the pillars were still to be seen in the land of Siriad.
Till the end of the Byzantine period, writers repeated that Seth
inspired by an angel, had taught men astronomy and even
astrology, is Tales of other sages writing their lore on pillars were
also told.' 47 Zoroaster, called the founder of star-science at
Babylon, was said to have set up 14 pillars, 7 of bronze, 7 of bricks
on which he inscribed the liberal arts, “so as to preserve them for
the use of posterity in the case of either flood.” Seth and Zoroaster
were identified; and it was due to a Scripture in Seth's Name that
the author of the Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum drew his tale of
the apparition to the Mages of the star that informed them of the
Messiah s birth. 48

We noted above that the Arabs told of Hermes building the
pyramids. They had received from the Sabians of Harran the
works of Hermes as the greatest old Greek philosopher, and they
accepted the view that the pyramids were stacks of vast treasures
with the pictures and hieroglyphs as instructions in secret
knowledge, alchemical and astrological. Edrisi (al-Idris, 1099-
1166) who composed his Geography at the Norman court in
Nelly in 1154, records:

In „ A f h -r [ Pano P° lis on easte “ bank of Nile] one sees a building
called al-Berba, which was built by the glorious Hermes before the
blood. He foresaw, by virtue of his arts, that the world would be
destroyed by catastrophe, though he did not know whether by fire or
water. And so he first raised walls of earthy matter, free from combust¬
ible parts, and covered them with pictures and scientific emblems in
order that in the event of the world being consumed by fire they would
remain and even gain in solidity and those coming after could read the
inscriptions.

Then, however, he caused a building of the hardest stone to be
erected, thus providing for the preservation of all sciences useful to
man, and said, “In case the catastrophe by water occurs, the buildings

destruction 1 ’ ^ remdn and P reserve science fro ^

When the Flood occurred, everything happened as Hermes predicted.
Buildings of the same kind are found also in Esna and Dendera but
those in Achmim are the most solid and remarkable for the number of
their pictures which represent not only the stars but also the different
arts, and further the number of inscriptions is very great. 49

In Spangles of Gold by Ibn Arfa’ Ra (died 1197) Hermes is called
a generic notion”. The real name is Ahmun, that is Henoch;

DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES IO9

and Henoch was the same as Adam’s son Idris. His home was
< ;hina; but coming through India to Ceylon, he found the Cave of
I Icrmes with vast treasures, a portrait of his father Adam, and the
loveliest jewels, including one especially large and costly (pre¬
sumably the Tabula Smaragdina)-, he was an alchemist. Psellos
links Plato’s voyage to Egypt with the legend of mysterious
re velations and tablets in the Pyramids. Arab writings on alchem-
ism are full of hidden books: The Treasure of Alexander the Great ,

1 he Took of the Discovery of the Hidden Secret of the Kaf the Book of
I lermes on the Causes of Beings. There are also the Arab hermetic
works, such as the Book of Krates (based on a Greek original)
where we meet not only the hidden book and its discovery, but
also the ravishing-up-to-heaven and the celestial vision, a book
delivered by some divine person (here Hermes Trismegistos), the
dictated book, the heavenly temple with open door, the fight
with a dragon. Further, for books in tombs, we have the tale told
by Ploutarch. 50 Numa, the legendary king of Rome, whom he
connects in various ways with Pythagoras, had his sacred books
at death put in a stone coffin to be buried next to that with his
body. Numa said that he had fully taught his doctrines to the
priests, and that he did not want such holy precepts to circulate
in an irreverent way. Some four hundred years later a great
rainstorm washed the earth from the coffins on the Janiculum;
one was quite empty, the other had 12 books of holy writ, 12 of
(1 reek philosophy. The praetor read the books and reported to the
Senate they were not fit to be made known to the public. So they
were all burned in the Comitium. 51

The Christians took over the idea of books of revelation. We
find them in visionary form in The Shepherd of St Hermes. In the
second Vision “I saw over against me the Old Woman whom I
had seen the last year, walking and reading in a certain Book.
And she said unto me: Can’st thou tell these things to the Elect of
God? I answer’d and said unto her, I cannot retain so many
things in my Memory, but give me the Book, and I will write
them down.” A fragmentary Coptic tale, near the nth century,
brings in Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Queen says,
“In my country there is a column, O Shelemo, Master of Kings:
if you send to seek it and if you can have it transported here, it
will be useful for your palace.” He calls up all his demons and asks
how long they will take to fetch it.

no ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The first demon replied, “I’ll bring it this evening.”

The second said, “I’ll bring it in an hour.”

The third, who had no more than half [a body], said to Shelemo, “I’ll
bring the column [between] two respirations of your breath.”

Indeed the word was still in the mouth of Shelemo when the demon
who had only a half was already on the way back. The column was on
his wing, it was turning this way and that like . . . All early knowledge
is written on this column. There is inscribed [the course] of the sun and
[the moon],. . , 52

The account given by Pausanias of a rite at Pheneos in Arkadia
perhaps gives us a clue to some of the ultimate origins of these
tales. There were “two great stones fitted to each other”. Yearly,
“when they are celebrating the Greater Mysteries, they open
these stones. Taking out certain writings, which bear on the
Mysteries, they read them out in the hearing of the initiates, then
put them back in their place that same night.” The books taken
from a secret place in a shrine are read out to initiates in certain
rites; then they are put back into a place that represents the
spiritworld or underworld. In the rite at Pheneos a masked
priest beat at the Underground Folk with rods”—presumably
to keep them at bay during the time when the stones were opened
up and the entry-exit of the spiritworld was dangerously open .® 3

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112 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

of activity and so as spirit or pneuma, which could be removed
from one substance and infused into another. “A tingeing pnerna
gives its colour to metals.” The colour of plants was their pneuma. 4
Generally the steps of transformation began with an earth or some
identifiable solid or an alloy or base metal like lead, the tetrasomy
(lead, tin, copper, iron), or “metal of magnesia”. What the
worker sought was to impose on these bodies the qualities of
liquidity (water) or fusibility and brilliancy (air, fire). The metal
or material had often first to be broken down into a “body”: a
degeneration that might be brought about by fusing it with
sulphur. This step was called blackening, melanosis. Then came
whitening, leukosis-, often a fusion with the “ferment” or “seed of
silver”, in which ingredients like arsenic of mercury were used.
Here was the counterpart of making or faking silver and its
alloys. The third step was the production of a violet or purple
colour, iosis. The violet ferment changed the gold through and
through into an ios of gold, which was the permanent tincture,
and, if cast on common gold, produced more.

This interpretation of iosis (refining) has been challenged. One
scholar has suggested that the iosis was a formation or purple
bronze like the Japanese shaku-do\ but such a formation does not
fit into the scheme of changes and there is no evidence for it.
Another suggestion is that iosis was the final removal of any ios :
rust or tarnish on the surface of the metal. However, it seems
sure that iosis was a third colour-change expressing the culmina¬
tion of the alchemic process, so that ios here means violet and not
rust.

Indeed we see in the process a very ancient scheme of mystery-
changes. The Souda, identifying Io and Isis, says that when Zeus
carried Io off from Argos he changed her into a cow through
fear of Hera; and this cow was by turns, white, black, violet.
A linked triad of colours appears in the Byzantine romance
Dosikles and Khodanthe (12th century), where the life-giving herb
is white at the root, rosy in the flower, purplish in the stalk. We
are here back at the theme of the life-giving herb which we noted
above in connection with the myths of Tylon and Glaukos. In
the version given by Hyginus of the Glaukos-myth we meet a
riddle, associated with the lad’s return to life: What changes
from white to red, and from red to black? The answer is the
Mulberry. The Glaukos-myth has clear signs throughout of
being derived from initiation-ritual; and riddles were often used

113

in such ordeals, in which the secret lore of the tribe or group was
handed on to the initiate. (There also seems colour-symbolism in
Pindar’s account of the birth of the prophet Iamos in a dark blue
nr kyanean thicket where the mother puts down her crimson
/one and silver pitcher, and the baby is steeped by the violets,

in gold and deep-purple light. Hence Iamos, it is supposed,
gels his name.) There can be no doubt that there was an ancient
link of the three colours with a herb of resurrection. 5 Violets,
we may further note, were taken as symbols of the rebirth of the
young man god Attis and of the rape-blood of Persephone;

1 hey thus link with the blood-plants like the pomegranate. In view
nl die close connection between the magics of plant and metal in
I he lores we have been considering, we may assume that the
colour-triad of the flower of death-rebirth was sought for in the
bodies, metals, of transformation—so that when such a triad of
. hanges were noted in the bodies, it was felt to be significant of a
change from death to life inside them. Indeed, we know the
alchemists used those very terms. Thus, Stephanos, speaking of

I he boros (standard or definition) of Philosophy, Alchemy, calls it
“(lie dissolution of body and the separation of soul from body”.

I'he Book of Krates says, “Know that copper, just like a man, has a
spirit and a body.” 6

I f we see the process as involving a further change, xanthosis or
yellowing, between the white and the violet, so that it is “quad¬
ripartite” (as the Anonymous states), the principle is not altered.
Zosimos addressing Theodoros says that “the yellow becomes
blood-coloured and stable and finally like dried saffron”. Ibn

II mail, writing in the 10th century and citing the Egyptian
l radition, tells us:

Marqunas said to Sanqaja, “O Sanqaja, similar is the habit of that
Water. Consequently the men of the Egyptian Temples gave it superio¬
rity over all things and made it the Head of the world. The World is
Maghnisiya. Hermes [Hurmus] called it by that name, for he said: It is
the Microcosm, and it is alive, not dying till the Day of Resurrection,
us long as the world will last—it revives all dead and it manifests the
hidden and concealed colours and takes away the external colours.”

Sanquaja said, “How does this take place, O King?”

Marqunas replied, “In it is a wonder. When you pour it out on
(hose three, the mixed things, and leave it [awhile], the White will help
the Yellow and the Red, and [in turn] it will whiten them and convert
them to the whiteness of pure Silver. Then the Yellow will help the

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114 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

White and the Red, and convert them into Yellow, and make them
the colour of Gold. The Red will help the White and the Yellow,
and will redden them and convert them into the Redness of the Serpent
of the Sea. When you see them in this state, pour away that Water,
because, if it remains in them, it will blacken them after the reddening!
If you let it remain, then truly you will have committed a mistake in
the operation and spoiled everything which you have correctly prepared.
And you will die from the pain of error, poverty, and grief at [losing]
wealth. I have explained all this in my book. Key of the Greater Wisdom,
by mentioning the Water that comes out of a women before giving
birth to a child. This Water woman name the Guide as it comes out
before the child and the child is then perfect.”

Sanqaja asked the King Marqunas about the knowledge of the Stone
and said, “Does everyone know this?”

Marqunas replied, “Yes, there is no one who does not know this,
and everyone has advantages in it not found in anything else. But no
one knows the advantages that you desire, save the men of the
Egyptian Temples.” 7

That is, the alchemists working in the secret tradition of Egypt.

In the Petter of Demokritos to Peukippos the colour-changes are
compared with those of the chameleon.

Take only two parts of treated copper, of arsenic and of sandarach
[realgar], a part of each, alum in a half part, two parts of saffron paste,
and pound for 21 days, or 14, or 7. After the reduction to powder,
add water, and when you’ve let it filter, you’ll see, in the course of the
levigation, differing colours like those of the chameleon. When there
are no more changes in many appearances, know that you have
succeeded in the reduction. 8

The Bolos-Demokritos of Plinius was very interested in the
chameleon itself. The account begins:

Democritus relates that its head and throat, burnt on logs of oak, cause
storms of rain and thunder, as does the liver if burnt in tiles. The rest
of his remarks smack of sorcery; and though I think them false. I’ll
omit them all save where a point must be refuted by mockery, e.g., the
right eye, plucked from the living creature and added to goatmilk,
removes white ulcers on the eyes; the tongue, worn as an amulet, the
perils of childbirth. The same eye, in the house, favours childbirth; if
brought right in, very dangerous. The tongue, taken from the living
animal, controls the results of courtcases; the heart, tied on with black
wool of the first shearing, overcomes quartan fevers.

The right front foot, tied as an amulet to the left arm by a hyena-

115

dIi m, is a strong protection against robbery and night-terrors; and the
light eat [or jaw] against fears and panics. The left foot however is
1, i.isicd in a furnace with the plant also called chameleon; an unguent is
added; and the lozenges thus made are stored away in a wooden vessel,
and, if we may believe it, make the owner invisible to others. The right
shoulder has power to overcome adversaries and public enemies,
(specially if a person throws away sinews of the same animal and treads
on them. But as to the left shoulder, I’m ashamed to repeat the
grotesque magic that Democritus assigns to it: how any dreams you
like may be sent to any person you like, and how these dreams are
dispelled by the right foot, just as the torpor caused by the right foot is
dispelled by the left flank . . . 9

And so on. The liver acts against lovecharms; the juice of
bdellium (elecampane), drunk in the skin, cures melancholy; the
nil halts or divides rushing rivers, and lulls snakes to sleep.
Aldus Gellius, following Plinius, also wrote scathingly of
Dcmocritos for having composed a book On the Power and
Nature of the Chameleon. “The hawk, swiftest of all birds, if it
chances to fly over a chameleon crawling on the ground, is
dragged down and falls through some force to the ground.” Pie
adds, “Many fictions of this kind seem to have been attached to
llie name of Demokritus by ignorant men sheltering under his
reputation and authority.” 10

1 1. Relief of Campaspe riding Aristotle, cathedral of Lyon, late 13th or
c ii ly 14th century a.d.; and Psyche ridden by Aphrodite and burned
by fire on the Sword-of-Damokles gem

Il6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

This interest in the chameleon makes all the more likely that the
Letter to Leukippos is by Bolos or at least draws strongly on his
writings. The process described in the Letter brings out another
philosophic principle that we may attribute to him: that of the
unity of matter in all its diverse forms and qualitative changes.
The stages at either end of the scale, and all the intermediate
stages, are equally upheld by a unitary stream or substratum, the
hjpokeimenon. It has been pointed out that this position is not’that
of Aristotle or Plato, but rather that of the Presokratics, who had
also a unitary notion of matter as something with a predetermined
nature or form underlying its accidental or incidental changes.
Plato’s chora (space), and even more Aristotle’s prote hjle (primary
matter), had only a sort of potential existence and could not
themselves be defined as being here or there, in a specific place or
with a specific form. 11 But that does not mean any regressive step
on the part of the alchemists. They hold fast to the idea of a
continual movement from the potential to the actual; but add the
Stoic concept of an endless series of tensional forces controlling
the movement (both from local or cosmic viewpoints). Thus they
pick up the presokratic unity at a new level, much subtler and
more complex, and they see it in terms of a hierarchical system of
varying degrees of organisation, in which changes of quality
appear. (Not, indeed, that we need to bring in the Presokratics at
all; Diogenes Laertes tells us of the Egyptians: “They say that
matter was the first principle, next the four elements were
derived from matter, and thus living things of every species
were produced.”)

The change in quality, which was also a change in inner
organisation, was linked or identified with the colour-changes.
Lead, a primary common metal, had to be broken up, changed,
driven up the scale, towards silver or gold; it had to change its
colour. So fire was invoked; and under its action the lead
was reduced to a fluid state. The fluidity thus brought about was
what constituted the primary level, in which new potentialities
were actively present. It represented, in one sense, the amor¬
phous state of Platonic Space or Aristotelean Primary Matter.
Also the liquefaction of lead involved its blackening. So the
blackness of the liquid condition above all expressed the attain¬
ment of a primary level, a state of chaos. Having produced chaos,
the alchemist was in a position to act the role of demiurge and
drive matter up its hierarchical ladder, with gold as the highest

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I 21

l hat both torture and release. 23 All this does not signify any
direct relation of the myth or the charms with alchemy, but it
helps to bring out the close inter-connections of so many of the
elements of culture in this period.

Before we pass on, we may note that Psyche developed an
important relation to fire as the active ensouling principle or
lorce. In the Chaldean Oracles she is identified with fire itself.
“Psyche is a Fire, luminous with the Father’s Power; she remains
immortal and Mistress of Life is she.” Eros in turn is first issue of
i he Paternal Intellect and introduces his “binding fire” into the
Ideas of that Intellect. No myth here connects them; but we can
see how the binding fire might be used in an ordeal test on the
ensouling principle if a tale of the initiation-myth type were told
(>f Eros and Psyche.

Among the statements attributed to Demokritos is that by
alchemy “you will conquer poverty, that incurable malady”.
Synesios makes this attribution; but the phrase is handed over to
Zosimos by The Book of Sophe, and it appears again in the treatise
of Agathodaimon: alchemy “drives away poverty in this world
and will bring great reward in the next.” 24 Alchemy thus makes
poverty a curable malady as the gem made love a curable wound.
From the brevity of the aphorism it is not clear if the alchemist
looks only to his own escape from poverty or to a general
elimination of hardships. The more personal interpretation no
doubt dominated in later phases; but at the outset alchemy may
well have shared in the deepening revolt against the social system
which is expressed in the many prophecies and apocalypses.
What more likely to be a key-force in inaugurating the age of
g(>ld than the science of transmutation into gold? In any event the
aphorism about poverty seems to belong to the earlier strata of
alchemic thought.

Tn an Arabic treatise that appears to hold genuine Greek
material we find Zosimos declaring that the ten processes, to
which the sage Demokritos gave different names, are truly only
one process and result in a single compound. Demokritos, he
says, declared that nothing was more difficult than combination,
which brought the Natures into a single Mercury. In another
Cairo MS we read: “They have called this secret the Egg; but
all of them mean Mercury.” And later, “The Ten that overcame
ilie One are the Colours that proceed from the Tincture of the
I '.gg. This is not found save in the Sea of Egypt, and it is its

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122 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Water.” These statements are in the key of what we know of
Bolos-Demokritos.

Oddly, the conflict of Bolos-Demokritos with the young
school seems to carry on in some tradition that appears in the
medieval Latin Crowd of Philosophers, where near the start Lucas
says that all things are from the Four Natures. Demokritus his
disciple agrees and is rebuked by Arisleus. Lucas remarks,
“Though Demokritos received from me the science of natural
things, that knowledge was derived from the philosophers of the
Indies and from the Babylonians. I think he surpasses those of
his own age in learning.” The Crowd answer, “When he attains
to that age, he will give no small satisfaction, but being in his
youth he should keep silence.” The tables seem to be turned on
him as a rash youth. In the Geponika the teachings of Demokritos
are opposed to those of Zoroaster.

We may now glance at the papyri of Stockholm and Leyden that
have often been linked with the Phjsika. The methods of Bolos
do not seem essentially Egyptian. They derive rather from
Syrian, Jewish, Babylonian, Iranian sources. Bodies are changed
by embedding them in chemicals which penetrate them right
through in a prolonged heating of the mass; the Egyptian
method on the contrary was by projection (with powder) or
sublimation (conversion to vapour by heat and back again);
chemicals were projected into the body to be changed, which
might first be conditioned by roasting. The Egyptians had had a
long tradition of dyeing of materials, as also had the Tyrians
and others. They had also long adapted dyeing techniques to the
tinting or tingeing of metals; they thus devised processes of
dipping into mordanting baths, alloying, and treating with
Royal Cement and Sulphur Water. This water was a reagent, a
solution of sulphuretted hydrogen, also called Holy Water,
perhaps on account of its horrible smell. It was made by heating
sulphur with lime, then pouring water in. “On opening the
cover,” Zosimos warned, “do not put your nose too close to the
mouth of the jar.”

Bolos used the data gathered by craftsmen, who seem to have
compiled textbooks on alloying, dyeing, imitating precious metals
and gems. It has often been suggested that papyrus X of Leyden
and the Stockholm papyrus are such textbooks in a corrupted or
mutilated form; but it has been shown that their recipes give no

•pi.iciical results. We have however a Koptic MS, dated 7th-8th
1 ( mi u ties, which reveals a system rather like that of the Stockholm
papyrus; and from it reconstructions have been made of the
tiii!'! nal dyeing recipes of that papyrus as well as of that of Leyden.
The two papyri (which, being found in a magician’s tomb at
I'hcbes, are actual examples of tomb-derived secrets) are certainly
ol I E gyptian origin. For example, silver, argyros, is described in a

I ci m, asemos, characteristic of Egypt. {Asem was properly elektron,
.1 natural alloy of gold and silver, from which, by separation,
either gold or silver could be drawn; this fact may have stimulated

II ic itlca that by such methods a man could change any metal into
another.) 26 But the papyri are no longer mere craft-manuals on
the colouring of metals and textiles. They may go back to the
lltjphika of Anaxilaos, written in Egypt where he had been
banished by Augustus for practising magic. 26 If so, he was
i a trying on the work of Bolos, who had studied the craft-manuals
in his quest for clues as to the changes in matter; he and his
school drew on the books of the craft-dyers of textiles and their
lerminology so as to find ways of describing the alchemic changes
nl (olour in metals and stones. 27 Terms used to define the de¬
creasing, mordanting (stypsis), and dyeing (baphe) of cloth, were
used to define changes of form in metals. Transformation into

ilvcr became baphe, that into gold katabaphe, superdyeing.
( >1 her terms, such as varnishing, bronzing, waxing were taken
over from old recipes for metal-tinting. Using extracts from the
1 ralt-handbooks, the alchemists carried out their experiments,
using or adapting recipes that seemed to effect or promise
in informations. To exclude the uninitiated, they often only gave
part of the recipe; and this sort of omission occurs in the Leyden

15. Pompeian painting of the torture of Psyche

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124 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

and Stockholm papyri. Alchemists admitted, “There is all that is
needed for gold and silver; nothing has been forgotten, nothing
lacks, except the vapour and evaporation of water. I have deliber¬
ately left them out, as I clearly set them out in my other writings.” 28
New terms and cryptograms were also brought in to denote the
chemicals of the dyers and metallurgists. The aim had completely
changed. It was now a philosophical inquiry into the nature of
material changes. Colour-changes (that is, qualitative effects)
were the main criteria, but there were a few efforts to control the
situation by means of weights.

Because of the attempt to make an esoteric doctrine or philo¬
sophy out the data of craft-recipes and the like, the creed of
secrecy grew up from the start, together with the use of symbolic
words: wolf’s milk, seafoam, cat’s eye, dragon’s blood. Here
there was again affinity with magical procedures. Thus in the
Leyden magical papyrus V we find Explanations, Hermeneumata,
dealing with the symbolic names of certain plants and stones,
names engraved on divine images to prevent the profane from
getting control of the practices. 29

Now that we have had a glance at what can be made of
the shadowy but crucial figure of Bolos, let us look back at the
historical Demokritos and see if we are at all clearer of the
relationship. Both Plinius and Aulus Gellius were very puzzled at
what seemed a contrast between the rigorously materialist
scientist and the champion of sympathetic magic in its most
fantastic forms. Gellius says the tales “are unworthy of the name
of Democritus”. Plinius, speaking of the twin palmbranch,
remarks, “Would that Democritus had been touched with such a
branch, since he assures us that by it wild prattling is restrained.
It is clear that a man, in other respects of sound judgment and of
great service to humanity, was brought low through his zeal to
aid mankind.” 30 Petronius, with his keen critical mind, pays a
high tribute to Demokritos, turning to him for an example of
entire scientific dedication in contrast with the prevailing de¬
generation under the Empire. “Love of money started off this
reversal f tropica]. In former times virtue was still loved for its own
sake, the noble arts flourished, and there were the sharpest
struggles among mankind to prevent anything being discovered
that might benefit posterity. So Democritus extracted the juice of
every plant on earth, and spent his whole life in experiments to

discover the virtues of stones and twigs.” 31 (He uses an astro-
immical metaphor for the turn-back in human affairs; the reference
In to Capricorn, where the sun turns back.) Note that it is to the
work on plants and stone, not to atomist theory, that he looks as
1 lie characteristic scientific activity of Demokritos.

It is impossible to believe that the whole tradition of Demo-
l.rilos’ studies had become perverted by the 1st century a.d. and
1 hat no Hellenistic scholar noted how a lot of alien treatises were
being foisted on to the philosopher. We must ask again if the
1 realises on plants and on the chameleon were the work of the
5 th or the 2nd century b.c.? That the historical Demokritos
n.1 veiled extensively and really did know the work of the mages
and tnagousaioi, we may accept. More than any other classical
(i reck thinker he seems to have been respectfully interested in the
ideas and practices of the barbaroi. We have seen that the strange
laics of his tomb-haunting seem certainly to have their origin in
the world of fact and to be connected with his theory of eidola.
That theory presupposes the idea of sympathetic and antipathetic
forces; for otherwise it would be impossible to explain why the
eidola, swarming furiously everywhere around us, impact on only
a' | icrson here or there. Demokritos carried out his experiments, it
seems, precisely to find out what conditions aided the impact or
deadened it. We have no account from him of how the eidola were
((instructed, but we may assume that he saw all spiritual activity
as the construction and emission of bodies of finer atomic
< (imposition than that of palpable bodies. Even inorganic bodies
seem to have been considered to own the power of emitting
eidola, and so the forms of energy were seen at work in all bodies
whatever. How the eidola emitted by a stone were differentiated
from those emitted by a man we do not know, but the theory
would seem to assume both a unity of energy at all its levels, plus
a differentiation. If so, it was in accord with the alchemic attitude
in matter, though the addition of Stoic concepts of pneuma, of
fields of force, was needed to make the system more coherently
dynamic.

The doctrine of the eidola seems certainly to go back to the
mages. Diogenes Laertes says of the latter: “They practice divina-
1 ion and forecast the future, declaring that the gods appear to them
in visible form. Moreover they state that the air is full of eidola,
which, emitted vaporously, enter the eyes of keen-sighted seers.”
We have here the basis of all the views attributed to Demokritos

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126 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

in this matter: a doctrine of emanations, aporrhiai , which result in
a host of flying images all around us. The application of the
doctrine by the mages, however, seems much more limited than
that of the philosopher. They seem to have devised it to explain
certain phenomena of second-sight and prophecy. Demokritos,
with his aim of finding a rational and materialist explanation of all
the strange phenomena in the universe, took it over and in¬
corporated it in his atomic system. However, the link with the
mages is striking. 32

If we knew more of the collection of Demokritos’ works made
by Thrasyllos in the first half of the first century a.d., we should
be able to estimate more clearly the difference between Demo¬
kritos and Bolos. But we must assume that the collection included
the works that Plinius cites, even if he was quoting from some
intermediary Latin version. On the whole we are driven to the
conclusion that there was much in the writings of the historical
Demokritos that had affinities with the later tradition of Bolos,
Anaxilaos, and Dioskorides. What Bolos seems to have added was
a more precise comprehension of the principle of sympathy-
antipathy, a more dynamic and organic conception of the
interrelationships of all bodies in the cosmos, and the triadic
formula of transformation, with its notion of a hierarchy of
levels. He thus founded what we may call the dialectics of
alchemy, the first fully based theory of development in forms and
bodies. This theory still lacked any evolutionary background; it
saw development as involving only the changes of single bodies or
groups of bodies inside a universe where the hierarchical system
had been established for all time. It was therefore cyclic, en¬
visaging a movement down as equally possible as a movement up
the scale. But it was none the less a tremendous achievement,
charged with endless potentialities.

To bring out how the idea of vital correspondences had become
more and more a part of the culture of this world, we may carry
further the analysis of the sibillations in the Sword-of-Dardanos
charm. The seven vowels in varying combinations were used both
in magic spells and in formulas of religious incantation. The work
On Style that goes under the name of Demetrios Phalareus states,
“In Egypt too the priests celebrate the gods in hymns through the
Seven Vowels, which they utter in due order; and the sound of
these letters is so euphonious that men listen to them in preference

!o pipe and lyre. So, if we do away with the clashing of the
v< >wels, we simply take away the melody and clashing of speech.” 33
I )cmetrios has been praising the euphonic effect of a succession of
vowels in composition, citing Homeric forms like eelios or onion.
Si range names and vowel-combinations play a considerable part
m spells:

Your Name composed of Seven Letters according to the Harmony of
1 lie Seven Tones which have their sound according to the Twenty-
right Lights of the Moon, Saraphara, Araphaira, Braamarapha,
Ahraach, Pertaomech, Akmech, Iao: ouee, iao, oue, eiou, aee,e eou,
rcou, Iao.

I invoke you Lord in a hymnic song, I celebrate your Holy Might,

II c e i o o 6 o. Sacrifice after song: eiovo...

,md so on with a string of more vowels. It has been argued that,
since the seven vowels were used by the Gnostics in place of the
seven tones of the seven-stringed lyre (tuned on the two conjunct
icirachords of the Dorian scale) we can read the letters as notes.
According to Pythagorean doctrine each tone of the scale
represented the note of one of the seven planets; and so each
vowel was a magical symbol of the music of the spheres. 34 The
due for determining the pitch of each of the tones represented by
.1 vowel was found in the Harmonics of Nikomachos of Gerasa,
who held the Pythagorean creed of the harmony of the world. 35
I lc stated that motion of each sphere made a sound, to which the
names of the seven vowels were given. (According to Anaximan-
dros’ system, accepted by the Pythagoreans, the spheres carried
1 lie heavenly bodies in revolutions round the earth. The later
lorm of these notions however came from Aristotle. Eudoxos had
worked out a single-centred system in a purely mathematical
tin (del, with the aim of correcting the angular displacement of the
planets as observed; Aristotle made out of this model a system
with substantial and definite spheres.) The concordance of
vowels, planets, tones, was taken over by the Gnostics. 38 Markos
m liis Silence said (according to Irenaios): “The first heaven
n< ninds the A, the next the E, the third the long E, the fourth in the
middle cries out the Might ( dynamic ) of the I, the fifth the O, the
•,ixth the U, the seventh and fourth from the middle calls out the
I dement of the Omega.” (The symbolism is increased by the facts
l lint the same word, stoicheion, was used for letter and for element,
,md that the Greeks had no numbers, but used letters for them.)
Sc) we get the system.

MORE AND ON BOLOS

129

128 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Moon

Nete

Venus

Paranete

E (long)

Mercury

Paramese

b b

Sun

Mere

Mars

Lichanos

Jupiter

Parhypate

Omega

Saturn

Hypate

So much for the mystical correspondences. But it does not appear
that the vowel-notes were ever actually sung. Nichomachos seems
to be considering a sort of mystical utterance, since he says that
the initiates invoke the god by hissings and sibillations, by
inarticulate and incoherent sounds. 37 The vowels were there
so that the initiate might transfer the sound from an earthly
to a heavenly sphere; the earth-notes were to be transformed into
the music of the spheres. Silence, Sige, was “the first companion of
the divine name”. 38 (A confused filtering of these ideas into com¬
mon parlance appears in a letter of the 3rd or 4th century, where
the writer, complaining of a lack of replies, remarks, “Among
philosophers silence is an answer.”)

When in the first chapter of Revelation Christ says, “I am
Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,” the reference
is probably not to the alphabet, but to the song of the magical
vowels of the Egyptians and the Gnostics. For the vowels in that
song represented the whole cosmos: the whole nexus of dynameis
and planetary influence and harmonies that made up the living
universe. Alpha and Omega in this sense have a vast and potent
meaning, which is hardly shared by the alphabet as a thing by
itself. 39 On magic gems we find stars put under vowels or vowels
put at the end of rays round the head of Khnoubis, whose solar
aspect connects him with the planets. One papyrus recommends
us to say Alpha to the east. Epsilon to the north. Eta to the west.
Iota to the south, Omicron to the earth, Upsilon to the air, and
Omega to the sky. Sometimes the tone of the voice uttering the
vowels is prescribed: thus alpha is to be spoken “with a swelling
tone and an open mouth”. 40

The play with vowels probably goes far back, though not in the
systematic way that we find in the later periods. Thus it has been
noted that Pindar starts his first Olympian and Pythian Odes with
syllables in which five different vowels appear in succession, as if
he were announcing the musical theme of some great fugue. The
sequences set out the five main tones of his vowel scale. 41 The

< 1 reeks were very sensitive to such effects, and this broad state¬
ment. of vowel-sounds at the outset may well have been felt to
establish some sort of harmony between the poem and its theme,
between the activities of men and the divine life. The suggestion
is not so farfetched as it may seem at first glance. Pythagorean
ideas about numbers, names and harmonies were already well-
known; Empedokles was using stoicheion for element; Plato was
si >< >n to use the same word for a simple sound of speech—later it
1 atne to mean much the same as gramma, letter. In the Kratjlos of
Plato Sokrates discusses words, not as signals or instruments for
distinguishing the various aspects of reality, but as vocal re¬
presentations or imitations of the object: as direct mimetic effects
like baa-baa or as phonetic expression of the inner nature of
tilings. It is argued that certain letters naturally express physical
qualities by the positions and movements of tongue and lips; even
ethical and dimensional qualities, it is suggested, can be thus
uttered. Though Sokrates ends by pointing to the limitations and
weaknesses of these positions, they had a strong basis in Greek
thinking and were to affect men for a long time. The Stoics were
much concerned with matters of phonetics and euphony, on
account of their doctrine of etymology: etymo-logia , the true
neiise of a word according to its origin as discovered by analysis. 42
I .oukian tells of a lawsuit between Sigma (S) and Tau (T) before
1 he Court of the Seven Vowels, in which S accuses T of stealing
his property, especially in Attic. Dionysios of Halikarnassos
discourses on the tone-qualities of various letters as well as on the
varying emotional or ethical effects of metres. He also puts the
common viewpoint that euphonious or melodious speech was a
sort of spell cast on the listener:

Who is not swayed and held as if by magical incantation, by one
melody of speech, yet quite unaffected in such a way by another, or
placated by one kind of rhythm and exasperated by others . . .

|The author should] join together words that are melodious,
rhythmical, and euphonious, by which the hearing is touched with a
In-ling of sweetness and sweetness ... or he should intertwine and
iiucr weave those which have so much natural effect with those that can
hi-witch [ goeteuetai ] the ear so that the unattractiveness of the one set is
1 ivcrshadowed by the grace of the other. 43

Thus a general idea of words as capable of magically captivating
effects led to precise and detailed formulations about particular
vowels or sibillations, which, playing their part in cosmic

130 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

correspondences, could compel both gods and men in desired
directions. Magic, we may note, did not merely operate by the
(supposed) laws of sympathy-antipathy; it also sought to a
great extent to change a given situation—to introduce new

qualities into it. To send love into the mind and body of some- 7

one who previously did not feel that love. To this extent it was

allied to alchemy, as it was also in many of the materials it used _

and in the frequent use of fire to bring about the desired change! Ostanes

W i', have seen the important role that Ostanes the Mage was said

10 have played in the crucial moment that brought about the
bi till of Alchemy. His formula it was that enlightened Bolos, who
had been wandering in a maze of facts or recipes about the
pi issible combinations and mixtures of matter, the diaphorai of hyle.
Was the tale of his role as master of Bolos-Demokritos a mere
fantasy? or does it hold an essential clue to the meeting of
thinkers, or the confluence of traditions, which created the new
science? Diogenes Laertes tells us:

11 )emokritos] was a pupil of certain Mages and Chaldaioi. For when
King Xerxes [during his invasion of Greece] was entertained by the
1.11her of Demokritos [at Abdera], he left men in charge, as in fact is
staled by Herodotos; and while yet a boy, he learned theology and
astronomy. 1

This is a very free interpretation of what Herodotos says. The
story may have come from the later writers of treatises About the
Magoi or from Hekataios, also of Abdera. Plinius adds that the
mage Ostanes accompanied Xerxes on his expedition; but no one
seems to have said that Demokritos as a boy met him at Abdera.

11< iwever the latter may well have seen and heard of the mages at
i lie time when the Persian army passed through his town. For
Plinius, as for the pseudo-Damigeron, Ostanes seems the chief of
the mages, not Zoroaster. We also find him called, in an oracle,
King of the Heptathongos, revealer of the invocation-formulas
with special effect on planetary deites. The Heptathongos appears to
mean the seven-corded lyre, emblem of the harmony of the spheres
;ind suggesting the seven vowels. 2 But for Plinius the masters
of Demokritos are Dardanos and Apollobeches. He also knows of
.mother mage Ostanes who accompanied Alexander on his
victorious travels. (Here there is a suspicious parallelism with the

OSTANES

x 33

I32 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

first Ostanes who accompanied Xerxes. Perhaps the Persians
wanted to say: Our own great invasion under Xerxes failed,
though Ostanes was there; but we still had our prophet with the
counter-expedition of Alexander, which won.) However the name
may have been common or handed on by father to son, as we find
in the story of the initiation of Bolos-Demokritos.

Plinius, who looks on the mages as the inventors and pro-
pagators of magic, is bitter against Ostanes. He cites the most un¬
pleasant recipes. Thus for an aphrodisiac, “The right testicle of an
ass taken in wine or a bit of it worn as an amulet on a bracelet; or
the foam of an ass after copulation, collected in a red cloth and
enclosed, as Ostanes tell us, in silver.” 3 The great power of the
mages, he says, built up over many ages, results from an inter¬
weaving of medicine, religion, astrology. Thus, “magic rose to
such a height that even today it has sway over a great part of
mankind.” He asserts, “without doubt it arose in Persia with
Zoroaster. On this our authorities are agreed.”

The first man, as far as I can discover, to write a yet-extant treatise on
Magic was Ostanes, who accompanied the Persian king Xerxes on his
invasion of Greece, and sowed what I may call the seeds of this
monstrous craft, infecting the whole world by the way at each stage
of their journeying. A little before Ostanes, the more careful inquirers
place another Zoroaster, a native of Proconnesus. One thing is certain.
It was this Ostanes who chiefly roused among the Greek peoples not so
much an eager appetite for this lore as a sheer mania *

Elsewhere he speaks of the blood of gladiators drunk by epileptics,
though we shudder with horror when in the same arena we
look at even the beasts doing the same thing.” They liked best to
suck blood from a living man.

Others seek to secure the legmarrow and the brain of infants. Not a
few among the Greeks has even spoken of the flavour of each organ
and limb, going into all the details and not excluding nailparings—
as though it could be thought health for a man to become a beast and to
deserve disease for the very remedies he begs. And by Hercules, well
deserved is the disappointment if these medicines prove useless. To
look at human entrails is considered a sin. What must it be to eat
them? Who was the first, Ostanes, to think of such devices as yours?
For it is you who must bear the blame, you destroyer of human rights
and contriver of monstrosities. 5

Then he goes on: “Granted that foreigners and barbarians
discovered the rites, did the Greeks also have to make these rites

1 licit own? There is extant a treatise by Demokritos stating that a
. 1 mi plaint is more benefited by bones from the head of a criminal,
.md other complaints by those of a friend or guest.”

The works written under Ostanes’ name dealt with plants and
Niones, as did those of Bolos. In these works as in those attributed
lo Zoroaster, stones were considered alive; they are described as
,icl ing together with animals and herbs in the composition of
( harms. The process of differentiation that sets in later does not
here seem very advanced. 6 Thus in an extract from Tatian (which
,1 glees with a passage in Nepoualios, who is himself full of
borrowings from Bolos) we read how in dealing with derange¬
ments of the spirit roots and herbs act together with a mixture of
liinews and bones; then there is the question of the instinct that
drives animals to eat herbs that will cure their maladies. 7

Under Nero, Pamphilos of Alexandreia composed a sort of
polyglot dictionary of plant-names (source of many items in the
I Marius of the pseudo-Apuleius as well of marginal notes on
Home MSS of Disokorides); he noted Persian or Aramaic words
1 hat Ostanes had used. 8 At least in part he seems certainly to have
been using works of Bolos. Plinius in the passage dealing with the
('Jmrokmeta of Bolos-Demokritos, stated that his author had
reproduced also the magical names of all the plants mentioned,
lb >los no doubt had found in the works of Ostanes and Zoroaster
or their successors nomina barbara which the thaumaturges
recommended for use in spells. It was this part of his work that
Pamphilos drew on. 9 If however we may trust the pseudo-
Apuleius and pseudo-Dioskorides, the works under Zoroaster’s
name used only Greek terms, often explaining the plants’ virtues
by their etynology, while Ostanes seems to use almost all foreign
words. It would follow that the Alexandrian scholars had a book
On Nature by Zoroaster with practically everything, apart
perhaps from a few Aramaic names, done into Greek, while the
version of those under Ostanes’ name largely transliterated the
mines and formulas.

As for stones, Plinius mentions Zoroaster among his con¬
sulted authors, but not Ostanes, who, though cited for other
matters, is never singled out as an authority. Plinius’ sources
could not have mentioned any specific work of his. 10 Only the
pscudo-Damigeron in his Latin lapidary mentions the name. This
lapidary, ostensibly dedicated by the King of Arabia, Evax, to
Tiberius, was at least written two or three centuries later; the

OSTANES

135

134 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

text on which the work was based however was clearly Hellen¬
istic. 11 From this latter many lapidaries give us extracts, e.g. the
Orphic Hthika in verse (4th century) or Aetios of Amida. The
pseudo-Damigeron omits the more bizarre bits of pagan magic,
e -g. the stone synoichites, which evokes the dead in Plinius, is*
soberly described. But, though he brings new elements in, he
preserves much of his original. When he remarks that the mages’
statements, though they may seem odd, rest on genuine
experiences, he is perhaps drawing on Bolos and Xenokrates in
their borrowings from Demokritos. 12

We must now look in a broader way at the Iranian tradition
represented by Ostanes. In Roman times there was in circulation a
literature composed in Greek and headed with the names of the
three mages, Zoroaster, Ostanes, Hystaspes. The background was
Iranian. The universe was seen as formed by two conflicting
principles or forces, light and dark, and a Saviour, born of Zoro¬
aster s seed was to descend into the lower world. We meet
traditions of Zoroaster changing his appearance so as to be
identified with the prophet Seth, son of Adam, and of his des¬
cendant Saoshyant becoming a form of Jesus. For this reason we
get the journey of the Mages to pay homage to the baby Jesus.
The books under the names of the three mages went back at
least to the 2nd century and helped to provide much of the myth¬
ological framework of Egyptian Gnosticism. Under Hystaspes’
name oracles predicted the end of the world, which was to be
preceded by the fall of Roman power. The authorities sought to
ban the predictions. So wide was the fame of the mages that
Arnobius imagines an unbeliever saying of Christ, “He was a
magus. Fie did all his deeds with secret arts, he stole the name of
mighty angels and far-off disciplines from the sanctuaries of the
Egyptians.” 13

The contact of Greek and Persian cultures went far back. In
the 5 th century, before Herodotos, Xanthos the Lydian mentioned
Zoroaster. Mages had already moved in from the east and lighted
their pyres in Lydia. Anaitis, the Persian Artemis, had a temple at
Hypaipa and at Hierocaesareum, the latter reputed to have
been founded by Kyros. And, before Artaxerxes Ochos put up
a statue of her at Sardeis, she seems to have had another temple
there. 14 Dionysios of Miletos, who composed in Ionian a History
of Persia from the death of Dareios in 516, dealt with the mages.

IVrsians were established in colonies in the plain which took

I mm them the name of the Hyrkanion Pedion and which had
.1 village Dareiou Kome. 15 Other Persians lived at Ephesos by the
sanctuary of Artemis, to which they had given the Highpriest, the
Mcgabyzos. The great altar at Pergamon was a fire-altar like
the pyraitheia of the Persians, as also was that at Magnesia where
Ariemis was identified with Anaitis. In the north at Daskylion a
pli-ccntury relief represented the mages sacrificing according
In the Mazdean rite. 16 The list of authors dealing with the mages
is extensive and shows that there was considerable interest
in them.

Already Herakleitos of Ephesos, who flourished at the end of
the 6th century b.c., knew of the mages: “Nightwalkers, magoi,
bacchantes, revellers and participants in the mysteries! what are
regarded as mysteries among men are unholy rituals.” But though
he thus expressed distaste for the popular festival-excitations, he
himself was deeply affected by the mysteries and wrote his book
in the hermetic style of a mystery-book or of the orphic hieroi
logoi-, the few liturgical fragments surviving of the Eleusinian
M ysteries show the same antithetical form as his writings. Born of
.111' undent royal family, he was by right of birth a priest-king and
lie composed in an hieratic idiom. 17 The importance of fire in his

I I linking suggests a strong magian influence. Though it would be
incorrect to call his terms alchemic, we can see in them the
elements that were coming together to form the science of Bolos.

hire for him was neither a mere symbol of the universal process nor a
substrate persisting as identical throughout its qualitative alterations.

I Ic speaks of it both as a token for exchange like gold in trade and
as involved in change itself; and it was the easier for him in this case
1 c»identify the sign and the thing signified, since fire does appear to be
the one existing phenomenon that is nothing but change. 18

I n comparing fire with gold he is equating the way fire changes all

II lings with the way money upsets and thows into flux all human
relationships; but the link is none the less interesting for us here.
Basic in his thought is the notion of the ceaseless conflict of
opposites; and he sees fire as a transformative force, as in the
t ryptic statements:

| The phases of fire are] craving and satiety.

It throws apart and then brings together again; it advances and
retires.

OSTANES

137

136 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The transformations of fire are first sea, and of sea, half becomes
earth, and half the lightning-flash.

The thunderbolt pilots all things . 19

The flash and the thunder are not opposed in ancient thought; each
term suggests both something seen and something heard. The
thunderbolt here seems to represent fire as a formative as well as a
destructive principle, so that there is a suggestion of a guiding
force in the transformation, though in view of the hermetic idiom
we cannot press the point. The flash, prester, however, seems the
active principle operating on water and earth. In a wild florid way
we find the same ideas and images in the Chaldean Oracles, eight
centuries or more later: From the First Intellect, we there are
told, “spring in abundance the implacable Thunderbolt, the
lightning-receiving Wombs of the all-illuminating Rays of the
father-begotten Ilekate, the guiding Blossom of Fire and the strong
Pneuma beyond the fiery poles.”

There is no need here to trace further the writers concerned
with the Mages, but we may mention Ktesias who was physician
at the court of Artaxerxes Mnemon in the later 5th century;
Dinon in the 4th century who feels the need to defend the mages
against the charge of wizardry and to define mageia as the service
of the gods; Eudoxos of Knidos, an important astronomer, who
denies the value of horoscopes, but finds value in the dualistic
outlook, identifying the two principles with Zeus and Hades—he
is probably the main source of information about the mages for
Plato and his school. Plato’s myth of Er, the man returned from
the dead, seems Iranian. Other writers much concerned with the
mages were Hermodoros of Syrakousa, Herakleides of Bithynia,
Eudemos of Rhodes (who studied the Zervanism being adopted
by some groups of mages, with its idea of resurrection followed by
immortality), Klearchos of Soloi (who was interested in fakir-types
of endurance), Theopompos, Hekataios of Abdera, Poseidippos
the Stoic, and so on. Aristotle in his work On Philosophy dealt with
the harmony of the world conceived as a great temple, the Great
Year, the periodical return of the same ideas in human thought:
views that are linked with those in the platonic PLpinotnis and with
those set out by the mages around Xerxes. He seems to have
thought the foundation of Plato’s Academy represented a rebirth
of the spirit of Zoroaster; he mentions 6,000 years as intervening
between Zoroaster and Plato. 20 After Alexander’s victories

Persia was opened up to Greek inquiries and influences, and
11 ml inued its own westward flow of ideas and images. Stoicism in
many ways provided something of a meeting ground for east and
west. 21

(Ammon among the tales or motives borrowed from the mages
were l hose dealing with visits to the underworld or callings-up of
1 he dead. We have noted Plato’s tale of Er. In the Axiochos we
hear of a description of the underworld inscribed on ancient
sKlai found in Apollo’s Delian temple; the author of this fiction
borrows from a traditional list of mages the name of his Gobryes,

1 lie revealer of a new eschatology. Klearchos in his book On
\ /np recalled the interest of Aristotle in the way the “psychagogic
wand” drew a child’s soul from his body. The child had fallen into
,1 lethargy (? how induced); and the wand gave him hallucinations.

( )n waking he recounted all that had apparently happened as if it
were fact, so that the event seemed a death followed by resurrec-

I inn. 22 In Plerakleides, Zoroaster was presented as the prototype
nl (lie initiate who, by the gift of second-sight, penetrated the
mysteries of the otherworld and was able to testify as to the
voyages of the soul borne by its aithereal body into the spheres
beyond. 23 Further tales of resurrections or supernatural visions
.in- told by Cornelius Labeo or by Loukian. The latter makes his
Menippos say, “I resolved on going to Babylon to beg the aid of
m >meone of their mages, the disciples and successors of Zoroaster;
lor I heard that by certain incantations and rites they open the
(.lies of blades, lead safely down anyone they choose, and bring
him back again.” In Babylon Menippos after much trouble
persuaded a mage, Mithrobarzanes, to help.

Under the mage’s tuition, he enters on a course of purificatory and
mystic rites, with a strict dietetic regimen, till he is properly prepared
lor (he dreadful descent. Embarking on the Euphrates, they sail to a
certain prescribed place, where they leave their boat, and begin the
prescribed infernal rites and sacrifices—still faithfully following the
authority of the poet of the Odyssey —invoking Hekate, the Erinyes,
titicl all the Daimons. The earth opens and the various infernal sights are
revealed. Descending, with much difficulty, the travellers secure places
on hoard Charon’s boat, already overladen with dead men, who have
mostly come to their end in battle.. . . 24

II is therefore significant that the one case where the conjuring-up
of a dead man occurs in the alchemic manuscripts, it is in
11 mnection with the mage Ostanes. This detail supports the

I 3 8 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

argument that Ostanes in the legend of Bolos stands for a genuine
mage-master or for Iranian influences in Bolos’ thought.

We then have abundant evidence that from the 6th century b.c.
onwards the Greeks were aware of Mazdean ideas; and two major
thinkers, Herakleitos and Plato, seem to have been deeply
affected. The Iranian influences which thus flowed into the Greek
world was however very far from the earlier Zoroastrian bases.
When Kyros took Babylon, he introduced there many mages, as
indeed he did all over Mesopotamia. In official rites they took
precedence over the native clergy of the Chaldaioi. Babylon was at
this time the centre of the scientific world, leading the way in
astronomy and mathematics. There the mages learned how to
interpret eclipses according to astronomical systems. Their supreme
principle became Time regulating the movements of the sky and
the life of the world, till the destruction, was divided into millennia,
each under a planet. Ahura-Mazda, their beneficient God, was
identified with Bel and other Avestic deities were assimilated to
the Babylonian pantheon. The magousaioi who carried the new
form of the Mazdean creed into western Asia Minor spoke
Aramaic and could doubtless not read the sacred books of
Zoroastrianism. Mithraism emerged as fusion of Persian and
Chaldaic cults. 25 The magousaioi long survived in Asia Minor.
Strabon saw them at work in Kappadokia, where they were
called pyraithoi, fire-kindlers, with shrines called pyraitheia.

In the middle of these is an altar, on which is a great amount of ashes
where the magoi maintain an unextinguished fire. They daily enter and
carry on their incantation nearly an hour, holding before the fire a
bundle of rods, and wear round their heads high turbans of felt which
reach down on each side so as to cover the lips and the sides of the
cheeks. The same customs are kept in the temples of Anaitis and of
Omanos. Belonging to these temples are shrines, and a wooden statue of
manos is carried in procession. These things we have seen ourselves . 26

Victims were not slit with a knife but beaten to death with a log of
wood as with a mallet. Pausanias in Lydia, saw the sanctuaries of
Hypaipa and Hierokaisareia; in each was a chamber with an ash-
piled altar. “But the colour of these ashes is not the usual colour of
ashes Entering the chamber, a magician \aner magos\ piles dry
wood on the altar; he first sets a tiara on his head and then sings
to some god or other in a foreign tongue unintelligible to Greeks,
reciting the invocation from a book. So it is without fire that the
wood must catch and bright flames dart from it.” Pausanias says

OSTANES

*59

In lias seen the marvel. 27 Persian colonies were still there at the
m i ic of St Basil. 28 One aspect of the later beliefs may be mentioned
line. Zervan, we learn from Syriac sources, was four-shaped,
lli rc*c activities or manifestations of Time were personified and
linked with him to make up the supreme being. It has been
suggested that the triad or trinity represented three stages of life;
more likely they stood for three stages of development in a
philosophic sense like those we found in the formula of Ostanes,
wilh Zervan himself as the all-inclusive unity within which the
Mages worked out their conflicts, changes, stabilities. 29 Mani the
great Babylonian reformer put at the head of the divine hierarchy
1 1 ic I r ather of Greatness ( Megethos) with Four Faces, his hypostases
were Light, Power, Wisdom; and Iranian texts translated his
name as Zervan. In Zervanism, as in Mithraism, Time has for its
manifestation the Heavens; and all good and evil is the work of
ilie 17 Zodiacal Signs and the 7 Planets. 30 It is important to note
dial the mathematical and geometrical sciences had in essence
been dealing with a timeless world, that it was the ideal of the
i lassical Greeks in general to get rid of time as a nuisance which
, 1 used accidents, distortions, confusions disturbing the rule of
pure abstractions, and that it was only with alchemy that time
1 cully comes into the picture in the scheme of a triadic set of
qualitative changes. The affinity with the fused Iranian-Baby-
!< mian systems is clear. Not that we can look for definite alchemic
kc hemes among the magousaioi. But the notion of time as consisting
(»l different phases, all leading to a coherent conclusion, was
something quite unlike the Greek systems, which either saw a
1 legeneracy in general or a cyclic movement. It was a precondition
of the more precise and dynamic formulation of Ostanes-Bolos,
which gave change a specific pattern of qualities (colours) and
snw it as issuing in something new.

W'c may note that the term pyraithes turns up oddly in a mort¬
gage contract of Oxyrhynchos, dated 30 March 154 a.d.; both
parties are there described as priests of “Athena Thoeris the
Mighty Goddess”, Megiste. Family-names, Psenephthas and
I lephaistas, show a connection with Ptah and Hephaistos,
metallurgical gods, so probably the work of fire-lighting was
hereditary. (The link of Thoeris with Ptah is rare, but a Ptolemaic
inscription calls her Beloved of Ptah.) We have no way of as¬
sociating these fire-kindlers with the pyraithoi of Kappadokia; but
1 lie similarity of name is interesting.

OSTANES

140 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Now if we turn to the alchemical methods attributed to Ostanes
we find that they do not consist of Egyptian methods of grilling
or of projection; they take the Persian way of soaking and then of
heating, cooking. 31 The commentary of Synesios says that
Ostanes remained true to the metallurgy of his homeland; he used
only the wet way. 33 This statement agrees with the Utter to
Uuhppos where Bolos-Demokritos, setting out the doctrines of
the Persian prophets, also rejects the Egyptian ways. “We don’t do
it like that,” i.e., not like the Egyptian prophets who have just
been cited. Synesios also refers to two catalogues in which were
listed the wet and the dry ways of making gold and silver. 33 We
find Ostanes linked with Maria the Jewess in the Demokritean
tradition, according to the Kitab al- Habib:

Explain to me,” she said, “what you have related about Ostanes who
spoke of the two coppers, iron, lead, tin, and silver, who has set down a
particular operation for each of these metals, and who has declared that
through the operation they become gold.”

. “ TI ? at « impossible and absolutely false. Only the ignorant believe
in such a thing. Ostanes said that only to put the ignorant off the scent
I have taught you that we do not need all the bodies you have just
mentioned What we want is an unique body, enclosing a unique
tincture. Always this tints only when it has itself been tinted and it is
only at that moment it tints. That’s why Demokritos has said- If you

want to find the composition, you will be able to tint all bodies with
Crod s aid. 34

This book derives from the Greek alchemists, and particularly
rom the Physika and Mystika. The point of the argument is that
there is only one operation or principle at work in transformation
Bolos-Demokritos repeated this idea several times, “There is no
need of these” [the bodies], and so on. 35

From an alchemic extract in a Syriac MS we learn that Ostanes
was strong on the need for secrecy:

As for Ostanes ... [he orders] that no one is to dare to alter his books
. . . not to dare to make additions or suppressions ... He orders every¬
one and lays down that his words are not to be made known to the
vulgar. He utters terrible oaths against their revelation to anyone
save to a man worthy of them, a man who seeks the truth and loves’
God who owns the fear of God, a man who is full of pity for the poor
and distant from all evildoing, and who doesn’t use his time as do
abandoned men and women.

He has covered up the mysteries with the same care as the apple of

141

his eyes; he has forbidden the handing of them over to unworthy
disciples.

That is why all philosophers have veiled the language of their
discourses and have put one sense in place of another, one name in
place of another, one passage in place of another, one species in place

< >f another, one vision in place of another. 36

This attitude went back to Bolos. Synesios wrote to Dioskoros,
“The philosopher [Demokritos] called things by many names,
both individually and collectively, so that he might train and
exercise us and see if we were understanding.” The Stone is

< ailed “the manynamed and nameless”. We hear: “I speak to you
men of good sense ... so that we may escape the incurable
disease of poverty.” Kedrenos says that Demokritos “taught that
11 is necessary to keep apart from all bad men”. There was indeed a
widespread feeling that secrecy was in the nature of things; that
secrecy lay at the beginning and end of quest, discovery, revela-
1 ion. When an Epicurean accused Plato of giving up demonstrable
truth for falsehood in the guise of poetic myth, Porphyrios
replied that myth was natural. “Nature loves to hide herself.” 37

We have a Utter of Ostanes to Petasios, written in a deliberately
obscure style. It deals with the making of the Divine Water by
means of various operations carried out in a glass alembic; then
an immersion of two mingled mixtures for a day and a night in
seawater. The product can kill the living and revive the dead. A
small drop is enough to create light or darkness, to vaporise sea-
waves or dissipate fire, give lead the look of gold, give sight to the
blind, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb. But the
writer is using allegories and warns the reader as to the real
bearing of his text by putting alchemic signs (of gold, mercury,
cinnabar, magnesia, sulphur, silver) above words that do not
mean those substances. He concludes with the triadic formula.
Perhaps we can see a trace of Iranian dualism in the stress on
death and life, dark and light. 38 The geographical area suggested
by the Letter is not Egyptian, Syrian, or Mesopotamian, but
Asianic; there is a reference to Mt. Olympus (of Lykia), Libanos,
and Tauros. The writer seems connected with a part of Asia Minor
where there were many mages. 39

Petasios (Isis-gift) here appears as a fellow-disciple of Ostanes or
a disciple of Demokritos. He is given the authorship of Demo-
kritean Memoranda, and appears several times in alchemic literature,
mostly in the work of Olympiodoros, where he is mentioned as

142 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

one of the imtiated who could speak of the art without too much
obscurity. A Syriac text, if rightly amended, makes him say that
meditation is necessary and that love of the art (disinterested
research) is enough for success. 41

. ^ Af J MS ^titled The Twelve Chapters bj Ostanes the Philo¬
sopher on the Philosopher’s Stone deserves a few words.

Those who have defended the secret at sword-point and have abstained

tWro3 “ a """“I 0 " u 1CaSt &0m giving “ the name ™der ^ich
the crowd knows it: they have hidden it under the veil of enigmas

Among the epithets they have applied we find: running water'

eternal water burning fire, fire that thickens, dead earth the hard

t'Et ten St °m\ the fUgitive ’ tHe fixed ’ the g en erous,’the rapid

S P r t0 w that Which Struggles ^ th ** 4at which

s by fire that wluch has been unjustly killed, that which has been

taken by violence the precious object, the valueless object, the domin¬
ant glory, the debased ignominy.

is to him r that knows “• How glorious for him who
practices it. How mean for him who ignores it. How infinite for him
who does not know it. Everyday everywhere we hear the cry: O host of
seekers take me kill me, then, after killing me, burn me, for I’ll revive'
after all that and 111 enrich whoever has killed and burned me. 42

The concept °f imtiation-ordeals and death-rebirth is applied to
the alchemic bodies in their changes. This analogy is not drawn on
by any accident; for it was in initiation-experience that men had
managed to express and develop the idea of movement from one
level of life to another level qualitatively different—from child¬
hood with its mother-world to adulthood with its totally different
set ot relations and responsibilities, its new lores and under¬
standings, and so on. Alchemy above all represents the scientific
application of these initiation-ideas of a leap from one qualitative
level of life to another; and that is why the alchemists keep
returning to the analogy of ordeals, tests, resurrections. And they
do not do so for any simple reasons of needing an analogy drawn
rom human life that helps to provide a schemata of stages and
to make the whole mysterious process of chemical change more
comprehensible. They do so also because they genuinely feel a
union between natural and human process; they are affirming a
vital and organic relationship to nature which the abstract or
timeless approach, with its emphasis on the alienated intellect of
men, had denied.

Further, in the continual paradoxes of glory and infamy.

OSTANES

J 43

itu-.i imable value and despised cheapness, we feel a link with the
jn ispcl creed that the last shall be first, the despised will turn out
111 be the chosen. Behind the antitheses lurks an element of social
ic volt, nurtured to some extent by the feeling that the alchemist is
. miside all the accepted cultural values and that in his obscurity he
is \i niggling for a secret of change that can give him mastery over

I >r< h'css. We find the assertion of the disregarded omnipresence of

II ic Water, the Stone, as a commonplace in alchemy as it develops.
Thus, Ibn Umail, after the passage cited where he says that only
ilie Men in the Egyptian Temples can make effective use of the
Water, goes, “ ‘O King, is it to be found when sought for?’
Marqunas said, ‘Yes, no commodity is sold in the world more
ih.m it, and everyone requires it, and everyone possesses it, and
ii is necessary for everyone to have it.’ He means by his statement
I 'his Water, because the Water is found in every place, in the
plains and in the mountains, with rich and poor, with strong and
weak. This is the parable that all the Sages quote about their
Slone; it is the Water, the Humid Spirit.” It is the essence of life,
i il development, but only the alchemists seek to grasp and under¬
stand its laws, enter consciously into its processes.

‘I'lie Twelve Chapters go on:

I )< m’t you see that it fights fire, nothing is more hostile to fire than it is.
When put in fire, it makes a crackling like congealed water that dis¬
integrates by action of cold and snow.

Know, seekers, that it is a white water which is found buried in the
r ii rlh of India, a black water which is found buried in the land of Chad-
jet, a red brilliant water which is found buried in Andalusia.

It is a liquid that bursts in flame at contact with wood into a violent
lire; a fire that lights itself at stones in the countries of Persia; a tree
that grows on the peaks of mountains; a young man born in Egypt; a
prince come from Andalusia who desires the torture of the seekers. He
has killed their chiefs and made of some of them the runners of princes.
The wise men are powerless to fight him. I see no arms against him but
resignation, no other steed than science, no other shield but intelligence.

I f i he seeker confronts him with these three weapons and kills him, he’ll
mine to life again after his death, he’ll lose all power against him and
will give the seeker the highest power so that he’ll arrive at the goal of

II is desires.

And so on. We are reminded of the wood on the Lydian altars
l hat catches fire of its own accord, and of the experiments (we
cited one recipe of automatic fire in chapter 3) leading on to

OSTANES

145

144 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

sXlfTT y ° Un8 min b ° m “ Egypt P“ ha P s ■'fen » the

struggle of a young man against a dragon beside the Nile which
“ d “T m T,X “ tfKrates- another version „T t iX

St L C ° f , tl ? e Tweke Cha P ters sh ows that it derives from the

f a l° d WhC ? alchc ; miC ldeaS WCre set out in elaborate rhetorical
fashion, with much antithesis and heaping-up of synonyms. But

and deTrv mT ““ and as the P oints «e strongly

stress the n^ f’ ^ Clte S ° me m ° re P assa g es th ^ seek to
aX the P arado ^ caI nat ure of the secret. Needless to say the
Aristotle here cited is an apocryphal figure: V

I have heard Aristotle say: “Why do these seekers turn away from the
stone? It ts however a wellknown thing, characterised, existentpossl

possibility?” *** qUaIitieS? Where is « found? What is its

dark e ndht m tt>r ri1 daact ^ e k h Y teIlin 8 you it’s like lightning on a
g • w can one fail to recognise something white showine-
up against a black background? The separation isn’t pLful for aZnf

two US e y °eI” d t0 dlStanCe - ^ ™ bC dubi ° US ^ hi - who ow"

We are agam reminded of Herakleitos’ lightning flash that guides
things. There is no direct connection, but ultimately the two
ST th£ Same - Tbe alohemic moment is that "when the

fullness Th an§e ’ dev f lo P ment is abruptly realised in its

ments I,V T ? T*^ purdy repetitive or quantitative move-

ents, circular and reducible to mechanical formulas, is split by a
force which exists outside all those formulas; and the vision of the
man who grasps what is happening has similarly leapt on to a new
level of comprehension. A guiding principle of qualitative

DrocesI ThT^ has bcen reali sed inside the unitary

process. The difference between the alchemic image and that of

former? 05 “ ^ ** ^ ** krgdy intuklve , whereas the
rmer has a more precise body of formulations about the nature
of process associated with it.

As for the places where one finds this stone, they are the houses shoes

bazaars roadways, public stores, mosques, baths, towns cities One
finds it in the earth and in the sea. .ns, cities. Une

As to its possibility. I’ll state that it is a stone bound ud in a stone a
stone fitted into a stone, a stone englobed in a stone. The philosophers

have slicd tears on this stone, and when they’ve flooded it, its darkness
Iui. disappeared, its sombre colour has been lightened, it has appeared
lilu- a rare pearl. Its possession has been assured and the seekers
have been amazed.

flu- point here is that there is nothing in the quest that carries the
(a cker into strange and remote aspects of life or matter. The
processes of transformation are going on all the while, every¬
where, all round one. The difficulty is not to track them out, but to

I mde i sland them. The mystery lies in the transformation itself, not
In some situation or material cut away from common life. The
le.irs of the sages are the divine water of transformation, which

II -.ides in human beings as much as in any metals or minerals, any
herbs or flowers, any stars or planets. The reference to a stone-in-
ihe stone is then not to magic stones like the aetites , or eaglestone,
about which may strange things were said: for instance that “it
has inside itself another stone as if pregnant,” and so has various
uses aiding a woman’s pregnancy and preventing abortion. 44 The
•ir/lle. r is merely a peculiar instance of birth-powers concentrated
in a stone. What the alchemists were talking about was an
omnipresent formative movement, which is shared by both men
.11 id 1 he organic and inorganic objects of nature.

The Sage has said, In the following words Aristotle has indicated the
.lone’s qualities and given a description of it. “It is a Lion reared in a
forest. A man has wanted to make use of it as a steed by putting on it
.-i 1 K1 lc and bridle. Vainly he has tried; he cannot succeed. He has then
hud recourse to a shrewder strategem, which has permitted him to keep
It in stronger bonds, and so has managed in saddling and bridling it.

I'lien he has tamed it with a whip, giving it grievous blows. Later,
he lets it loose from the bonds and makes it walk along like a degraded

I icing, so that anyone would say it had never been wild for a single day.”
The Stone is the Lion; the Bonds are the Preparations—that is, the
matters I’ll discuss in the next chapter. The Whip is the Fire. What do
you say, seeker, of this so-clear description.

I lore is another account given by the Sage. “What then are men

I I linking of? They talk of the stone but get nothing out of it. They
w rap it up, they use it as salves for dealing with scab that covers the
body and they draw no advantage from it. They tread it underfoot and
yd never get hold of it.”

Another Sage has said, “I’ve lived now forty years and I’ve never
■ pent a single day without seeing the Stone day and night so well that I
was fearing nobody could help seeing it too. I then used yet more
enigmatic expressions than those I’d used at first and I have increased

146 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT
the Obscurity of the phrases out of fear that their sense was already too

Know then that the authors in their books have used a great number

IeaYin°;

far as I know, the ones best known in the worldHt is called- lion’
arsenic! tutty,’ foam“of

ulac tirac tare, dumb man, oppressor, submitted [being] magnet fat’
V^s^; W ’ ^

We see here a contradiction. The alchemists insist on the

whkh S the natUre ° f 4 thelf qUCSt and itS g ° aI ’ and ° n the wa y in
talktf ' mCd pr ° Cesses are P art of common life. They
v of curing poverty; they want their science to enter into life

ITZ Tcosf h 7 t thCy tfCat thdf ICaming aS some thing > that
all costs be kept among a few dedicated seekers and

ever unveiled to the masses. We shall later consider the full
reasons for this position, but here we may note one point The
alchemy were not concerned with producing gold forfeit own
benefit, even if a practioner now and then tried to cash in on his
res and impress a ruler (Gaius or Anastasios). They felt them¬
selves forever trembling on the innermost secret £ universal
p ocess, and they wanted to clarify and stabilise their grasp of this
sec e t before they worked out the applications of theirknowldge
They were convinced that at the stage in which thev found
themselves the divulging of their methods would mean their

greeTSiT'self “ ^ ^ t0 find S ° ld for reasons of

greed and self-aggrandisement; and the deeper motives of the

quest the search for pure knowledge and insight into process

w h a hope of some kind of ultimate elixir and control of nature

dissl°ated m w ltSCl 2rr Uld bC compromised > corrupted, and

aware of ^ T ' f the ? Wefe also onI P

aware of the gap between their actual knowledge and the high

claims they made, between the actual products of their expefk

Soduced Tb e tm ? lntUiti ° ns and momentary certainties they
produced. They felt that to make their proceedings public would

incambk 7 t0 ridicuIe ‘ ^ir deep convictions, still

incapable of clear and direct proof, would be mocked-at and they

OSTANES 147

ilu msclves would lose their sustaining faith. I do not mean that
11 icy (bought quite in these terms but that something of this sort
nl c< inflict went on in their minds and emotions.

In (lie same manuscript as the Twelve Chapters is another, The
I infil: of Thirty Chapters , in which we gain a picture of the ordeal of
( ):.lanes himself.

When 1 realised that love of the Great Work had fallen into my heart
.Hid that the preoccupations I felt about it had chased sleep from my
ryes, that they prevented me from eating and drinking so that my body
was wasting away and my appearance was bad, I gave myself up to
prayer and fasting. I begged God to drive out the miseries and cares
dial had taken hold of my heart, and put an end to the perplexed
si I nation in which I found myself.

While I lay asleep on my couch, a being appeared to me in a dream
,1111 1 told me, “Rise up and understand what I am going to show you.”

I rose up and went off with this person [Hermes Trismegistos?]. Soon
we arrived before Seven Gates so fine that I had never seen the like.
"I I ere,” my guide said to me, “are found the treasures of the science
you seek.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “Now guide me so that I may penetrate into
lli'cse dwellings where you say are found the treasures of the universe.”

“You will never penetrate there,” he answered, “unless you have in
your power the keys of those doors. But come with me. I’ll show you
l he keys of those doors .” 46

Ihc Seven Doors are the seven planetary metals conceived as
essential steps in the construction of matter; they are also the
seven stages of the Mithraic initiate and the seven planet-gates
nl the ascending soul. The imagery goes back to the ancient
Mesopotamian ritual-myth of the goddess Ishtar coming down to
die underworld and discarding a veil at each gate; the naked
im iddess at the end is truth in its pure revelation.

(Istanes goes on with his guide and comes on an animal such
.is he’d never seen the like. It had vulture-wings, elephant-head,
dragon-tail, and each of the three parts was trying to devour the
< ilhcr.

When I saw it, I was filled with a keen terror and changed colour. My
guide, seeing my condition, said, “Go up to this animal and tell it: In
die name of mighty God, give me the keys of the doors of wisdom.”

Then, though full of terror and dread, I made my way to this animal
ami said to him the prescribed words. He handed me the keys. I
1 ipened the gates and arrived at the last one. I found myself confronting

OSTANES

149

148 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

a plaque with a shining and multicoloured aspect. When I looked at it,
I couldn’t possibly sustain the lustre.

The monster is the triadic formula, or rather the metals under-
going the ordeal-transformation in its terms. (This symbolic fact
obscures the difficulty of wings or a tail preying on a head.) The
bright plaque is the ultimate unity in which all colours are merged;
the philosopher’s stone which in medieval days was called both
peacock and rainbow. Now in the narrative we again meet the
magical number seven; for the plaque was inscribed in seven
tongues. The seven tongues are another seven gates through
which the goal of gnosis can be reached. The motive was probably
introduced because of the tradition, found in Syriac texts, that
Zoroaster produced the Avesta in seven tongues; the list varies
but seems to be meant to refer to the seven regions or climates of
the earth. Perhaps the seven versions of the Avesta in turn were
invented as a counterblast to the propaganda of the prophet Mani,
who had boasted that he himself wrote his scriptures while Jesus
and Zoroaster had to get others to do it for them. Mani had also
ordered a translation of his works in seven tongues. An Arab
evangel of Christ’s infancy says, “She, [Mary will bring forth],
without breaking the seal of her virginity and .. . her good news
in the seven climates of the earth.” 47

The first inscription was in Egyptian and Ostanes read it. We
meet the triadic principle applied to the individual and his
struggles towards a deepened consciousness; we are reminded of
Mani’s trinity of Light, Power, Wisdom.

I am going to set out for you the allegory of the body, the vital spirit,
and the soul [i.e. soma, pnenma, psyche]. Study it with your reason and
your intelligence, and, if you give it all your attention, you will be
set well on your way to accomplish each work and to learn all that is
hidden.

Body, soul, and spirit are like lamp, oil, and wick. Just as the wick
can’t serve a lamp without oil, so the spirit cannot be of use in a body
without soul. The vital spirit of the body is the blood; the soul its
breath which spreads itself out in blood and heart right up to the
extremities of the body and this last, you know, consists of flesh,
blood, sinews.

Know that if you lodge the spirit alone in the body without bringing
the soul in, the body would have no source of light; it would be as if
wrapt in darkness. When you make the soul penetrate it, the body finds
affinity with it, is purified and takes on a handsome aspect.

Crasp well what I’m going to tell you, for it’s an important matter
,1111 1 nobody could be led to the hidden science of which I speak if he did
in ii know this chapter. Don’t you see that fire possesses a brightness, of
1 ,i y s and of lustre. If you sprinkle it with water, the brightness and the
lustre vanish and it becomes darkness after having been brightness.

I f you take fire and water, and by working as we set out in the present
hook you succeed in mingling and combining them, neither of the two
will be able to hurt the other any more and their union will give twice
in much brightness and rays as when they were in their primitive state.

I hat is how you must begin; for that’s the way your predecessors
began. At the outset the primitive elements were fire and water. It’s by
coupling water and fire, by combining them, that are formed numerous
1 11 ulies, trees and stones. The right course is then to proceed by analogy,
,11 ling for the final science in conformity with the method followed in

I lie primitive science.

Pneuma is that in every man which links his body-soul with the
living universe. Soul is the individual life activating the body and
enabling it through the pnenma to achieve universality. The lamp-
metaphor, dealing with separated things, is not very illuminating
lor a matter of process; but its general implications show how
the alchemist connected the body-soul-spirit relationship with the

II iadic formula. Soul penetrated body like the more active of the
two chemical substances in an experiment of alchemic change; it
brought about the existence of a third and higher substance,
pnenma, which put the body-soul mixture into a new and active
relationship to the cosmos. In short, human life was a perpetual
alchemic process by which the dynamic body-soul union sparked
oil' the vital link with the various fields of force surrounding the
individual. The problem for the alchemist was to grasp the full
nature of the life-process as revealed in himself and in all men, and
then to apply and realise its pattern in other fields.

There are two further points. First, we may note the similar
notion of pneuma and souls in the passage from the Kore Kosmou
(| noted in our first chapter, where, in an idiom better suited to a
philosophy of process, we meet the view of the soul-stuff or
rather soul-activity, psychosis, as produced chemically (that is, by a
l ransformative process) out of the universal forces or pneumata.
Since th &psychai are individual souls, the assumption is that they
link body and pneuma. Secondly, the Ostanes-passage states water
and fire as the primitive elements: a dualistic view that looks
towards Iran and the mages. In another (Latin-Arab) text Ostanes

OSTANES

150 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

says that there are four elements, but “of these water and fire
are the roots, radices. Earth and air are composed out of them.”
And he tells Maria, ‘ Our water has our earth remaining in it. It
is great, lucid and pure; for out of the thickening of water is
earth created.” 18

Ostanes looks again at the shining plaque and finds that the
second inscription is written in Persian. It runs:

The Land of Misr [Egypt] is superior to all other cities and towns on
account of the wisdom and knowledge of all things that God has
bestowed on its inhabitants. However the folk of Misr, as well as those
of the rest of the world, have need of the inhabitants of Persia and cannot
succeed in any of their works without the aid they draw from this last
country. Don’t you see that all the philosophers who have devoted
themselves to the Science have addressed themselves to persons of
Persia whom they have adopted as brothers.

Then it goes on to give in detail a letter sent by someone asking
the Persians to send a man able to translate a book that has been
found. We shall find the same motive in the letters of Pibechios
soon to be considered. The third inscription was in Indian. This
claims in turn that the Hindus from earliest times have had the
superiority over other men. The sun is nearer to them, hence “the
vigour of nature in our land. If we had not need of Persia we’d
be able to achieve the entire work with only what comes from
our soil and our seas.” A tale is added about a sage sending to
India for the urine of a white elephant as sort of panacea. The
rest of the inscriptions, we are told, were effaced by time, so we
don t hear of the other four nationalities.

However, Ostanes’ adventures were not yet over.

While I was examining the part I hadn’t managed to decipher in this
plaque, I heard a strong voice crying out to me, “Man, get away from
here before all the Gates are shut; for the moment of closure is come.”

Trembling all over and afraid it was too late to leave, I went out.
When I had passed through all the gates, I met an old man of un¬
paralleled beauty. “Approach,” he told me, “man whose heart is
thirsty for this science. I am going to make you understand many thin g.;
that have seemed obscure to you, and explain what remains hidden.”

I approached the old man, who then took my hand and raised his
own towards the heaven, swearing by the God of the Heaven that I
possessed the whole science and that all the secrets of wisdom were in
me. I praised God who had showed me all that and who had made all
the science’s secrets manifest to me.

H 1

While I was in this state, the three-bodied animal, whose parts
devoured one another, cried out in a strong voice, “All the science can
be perfected only by me, and it is in me that is found the key of the
Reicnce. He who wants to accomplish the work in its perfection, let him
recognise my true power and he will lack nothing of what the
philosophers have said about the work.”

11 caring these words, the old man said to me, “Man, go and find that
animal, give him an intelligence in place of yours, a vital spirit in place
(if yours, a life in place of yours; then he’ll submit to you and give you
all you need.”

As I wondered how I could give anyone an intelligence in place of
mine, a vital spirit in place of mine, an existence in place of mine, the
old man said, “Take the body that is like your own, take from it what I
have just told you, and hand it over to him.”

1 did as the old man bade me, and I acquired then the whole science,
as complete as that described by Hermes.

We see that the alchemist has to be able to identify himself with
1 lie triadic beast, the formula of transformation or development.

I le must realise the unity of man and nature—not as a general
idea, but by a concentration of his entire mind, body, and spirit
on the work he is doing, so that he truly feels himself disinte¬
grating, tom apart and put together, reborn in a new form. This
identification of the scientist-artisan with the processes he is
producing, is perhaps the hardest aspect of alchemy for anyone
nowadays to understand or enter into. To men in whom the
alienation of the intellect from the world of nature has been
carried very much further than among classical Greek thinkers,
die whole thing seems fantastic and overstressed, unreal. But in
I act it was passionately real, and in my opinion it held an element
of truth which we must strive to grasp and recapture if our
science is to measure up to the full demands of reality. Of this
point I shall have more to say later.

Who was the old man? It has been suggested that he was
Agathodaimon, of whom we shall hear more later; but the
reference to Hermes (Trismegistos) at the end makes it more
likely that he was Hermes himself. In that case the guide at the
beginning of the vision must be someone else. The vision is an
odd document which on the whole inclines towards making the
Persians the true centre of alchemic lore, yet shows traces of a
version in which homage was paid to Egypt and its great seer
I Iermes-Thoth. 19

The link of Ostanes with Demokritos and with Egypt is again

152 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

brought out in the Shaw ah id of Ar-Razi, which quotes Apollonios
of Tyana as saying that when Demokritos accompanied Ostanes
to Egypt they found alchemy there to be based on the theory of
Hermes that it all proceeds from the One Thing. The Egyptians
were using as their main material Pigbrain on account of its
likeness to the human brain. The visitors held that eggs had the
same essential nature as brains and produced the same results;
and the Egyptian sages accepted this viewpoint despite the
difficulties in the alchemical manipulation of eggs. The resulting
aphorism (“He who acquires the Philosopher’s Egg must succeed,
for it is the Tincture and is found in every house”) seems based
on the Hermetic theory, though Hermes had laid down that only
substances of mineral origin were to be used in experiments;
nothing organic. Ar-Razi commented that by the Philosopher’s
Egg the Hair was meant, and that, as eggs could be got at a
trifling price, the saying of Demokritos (about a Stone that is
not a Stone) was confirmed. It has been suggested that the use of
e Sgs by Demokritos—Ostanes implied a school which had dis¬
covered the chemical activity of Sal-Ammoniac, a reagent that
could be made by the distillation of organic substances and
would thus suggest the use of such substances in place of minerals
in alchemy. More of this later. 50 Before we pass on, we may look
at another passage in the MS which holds the Twelve Chapters
which throws further light on the account of Ostanes’ initiation!
(The initiation-rite of the alchemist, we must remember, was a

symbolising of the alchemic process itself.) The manuscript is
fragmentary.

I adjure you, in the name of the immortal gods and in the name of the
God of gods, by the power .. . unfathomable in itself, that warms by its
fire, that turns and circles before the figure of the ineffable image.

It is not to the son nor to the brother ... nor to the false friend nor
to the [faithless] confident of the secret that one should reveal these
books I have written for the love of God: above all that who gold and
si ver. You must know also this: I have prayed the immortal gods not to
let my words penetrate the ears of the foolish. As for adepts [who have
betrayed the] mystery, they must not even see one of my books .. . Do
not be mad enough to dare to claim the transmission of the tradition to
them, for the book is guarded by God ... [It treats] of the art and its
operations, but the art. . . to God who . . .

... thus it has been offered to him [who deserves it]. His master gives
it to him and makes him know . . . Thus you are very happy ... it is
reserved for those worthy. . . The art is not given to every man . . .

OSTANES

I lc pointed out the road with his staff. . . He questioned me and
wanted to learn where I claimed to be going. I persuaded him to be my
master and direct me in the way that leads to the hidden treasures. He
understood my secret desire.. . He took thus and pointed with his
r.ialF. . . I persuaded him to be my master and direct me in the way that
leads [to the hidden treasures]. He understood my wish, but he feared
die immortal gods and did not wish to travel with me ... I promised
. . . that I’d give him the double . . . we arrived thus at the hidden
treasures. He made me a sign with his hand [to offer] on my part the
sacrifice that the gods demand. I carried out his desire and gave soul for
soul and body for body. But even so there was no agreement as to
holding up the fast—and I lost my life . . . Then I stayed 40 [days] . . .
A second god opened for me [the dwelling place of] the sages, covered
witli a mound of herbs and dew, clothing of body and soul. I knocked
after having stayed 4 times 40 days before each door. Then I went in
through the door . . . after having offered many and suitable gifts. . . . B1

This passage, multilated as it is, helps to fill out the picture of
()stanes’ ordeals, which are here described as a death. The
initiate surrenders his double, his other self. All sacrifice has an
aspect of killing another creature so as to ensure one’s own life;
t he victim is the image of the killer, who rescues his own life by
offering up that of another. (This had its literal truth since the
victim was in part eaten by the sacrificer, in part by the gods.)
Hut this aspect came up more sharply and consciously in the
Semitic world than anywhere else. The cuneiform tablets plainly
slate the idea of the victim as a substitute for someone threatened
I >y death; Porphyrios attributes the same idea to the Carthaginians;
and a series of dedications in Africa to Saturn (Baal) deal with the
night-offering of a lamb, “soul for soul, blood for blood, life for
life”. In the African sacrifices it is uncertain whether the lamb
lakes the place of a child, who had previously been sacrificed, or
whether it is merely a question of a substitute of lamb for sacri-
licer. 52 The whole concept of the redemption of worshipper by a
dying god represents the system on a higher level, especially
when the god is imaged in animal form (Dionysos as bull, Christ
as lamb) and is eaten in some direct or symbolic meal of com¬
munion. Here the self-sacrifice of the initiate takes up the redemp¬
tion-theme but applies it to the death-rebirth of the metals,
which is also the death-rebirth of the alchemist. “The double”
is a strange phrase. Perhaps it means that the initiate offers up his
previous self, which otherwise would hang on and accompany
the new self; perhaps it means that the metals, realised in their

OSTANES

155

154 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

alchemic values, become a second self, which the initiate offers
up by driving them through the triadic process of qualitative
change. In any event the initiate is assumed to reach a new unity
of self, in which all his facilities, thoughts, and emotions are
concentrated on, and dedicated to, the Great Work.

Finally we may note the Syriac texts of letters supposed to have
been exchanged between Pebechios and Osron, a Persian, which
fill out what the plaque-inscription said about requests for
translations from Persian wise-men, and which thus seem part of

the propaganda on behalf of Persia as the great source of alchemic
lore.

Pebechios humblest of philosophers to Osron, greeting. I have found
m Egypt the divine and hidden Books of Ostanes, written in Persian
script, and I cannot make them out. I beg you then to judge me worthy
of your grace and send me the Persian Letters so that I may decipher
the hidden words set down in these books. For I have a great passion
and a lively desire to gain this knowledge.

I ask then the favour of being rated worthy to receive without
jealousy this man’s doctrine, who possessed the spirit of God, so that I
can copy the writings composed in Egypt and reveal those composed
in Persian. I ask for those Letters to be sent to me so as to be made
available to all the world. As soon as I have succeeded in explaining
these books, 1 11 send you back again the tablet that I’m asking of you
Answer quickly before death [?word effaced] comes on me. 53

Osron, the humblest of the mages,” sends his reply:

When I got your letters I felt a great joy and I received a great honour
since you judged me worthy of being singled out from among the
mages my colleagues. [He sends on the requested Letters and begs to be
sent the revelation.] For old age has seized on me and I fear that the
weakening of intellect which is a malady of the spirit is coming on me-
or rather indeed an attack that may bring disorder on my spirit and I may
cease from being worthy of the divine spirit. I salute you all, copyists

°m t ^ e i ?r ine B °° kS ° f ° stanes > and above all [? word lost] you, the
chief. Pebechios, as well as those who receive your teaching.

Pebechios answers, after many compliments:

I have opened the book and have found there the whole art of astrology
astronomy, philosophy, philology [fine literature], magism, mysteries
and sacrifices; finally, that art so dreaded by many persons and so
necessary, that of working gold. This art was written down [words

|. All this book was under the protection of God’s name; and the
whole book treated of minerals, purples, and divine tinctures of precious
niones. I have transcribed it by means [word lost?] of Egyptian and
(. i cck writings , and I have thus rendered it clear for all the world. I
have transcribed the Seven Scriptures such as I have found them.

I have found a divine book, more precious than all the others. With
justice the divine Ostanes called it The Croivrr, for it is the Crown of all
the Gods, the Master of Books. It has been named Sun [Gold] and
nothing is more excellent, except God. In transcribing, in reading, and
in acquiring the earthly [virtues ?] embedded among the things written,

I was astounded to find words free of all envy; to see how complete
1 1 icy were, how rational and pure; how Ostanes was animated with
(hid’s spirit, he who, bring a universal writer and a doctor, did not
disdain the role of disciple, although all these sciences in reality came
I mm him [word lost ?].

As for me I have forced myself to write according to his doctrine. My
mini has got the profit, but my body is worn out with the labour
needed to make the divine words emerge from this gift put at our
disposal.

Nnic the lack-of-jealousy motive again. Pebechios (hawk) was a
1 iimmon Egyptian name; but our Pebechios here is no doubt the
man who appears in the alchemic lists and in a magic papyrus. 64
The division of the material (minerals, purples, stone-tinctures)
suggests the Physika and Mystika. The theme of a Persian book
done into Greek appears again in the Letter of Demokritos to
I .rnkippos, where also the invention of alchemy is attributed to
1 he Kings of Egypt. 65 The Seven Scriptures, we saw, was a
Zoroastrian motive—do we see the popularity of this number in
such a context, in the name Septmgint or Seventy given to the version
ol the Hebrew Bible made at Alexandreia, though the story
actually ran that six elders were sent from each of the twelve
1 lilies of Israel, that is, seventy-two men, who worked for
•.cventy-two days? 56

Next comes a fragmentary passage where Osron speaks of 365
sections of some work, which perhaps Hermes confided to the
Kings of Egypt and on which his disciples wrote commentaries.
In these latter they explained the 365 days of the year “plus the
extra day added to complete time”.

They explained what was written on the priestly stelai of Hermes, on
each of these stelai. They read there the six days and showed the true art
1111 be King. The King, after rejoicing at the fulfilment of his desire and
giving thanks, constructed secret places in Egypt. He inscribed the

OSTANES

157

156 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

divine and unutterable art of Seven tables [or stelai] as much with his
own hand as with those of the philosophers; then he placed them in the
secret place. He set at the end of this place Seven Gates: a gate of lead a
gate of electrum, a gate of iron. For the Sun that lights up the universe
he established a gate of gold; for Kronos [read Aphrodite], a gate of
copper; for Hermes, a gate of tin; and for the Moon, a gate of silver.

. [Marginal note] In a manuscript we have found: a gate of lead which
is Kronos; a gate of electron which is an alloy, which is Zeus; a gate of
iron, which is Ares; a gate of gold, which is the Sun; a gate of copper
which is Aphrodite; a gate of tin, which is Hermes; and a gate of
silver, which is the Moon.

Here once again we have the seven steps, the seven planets, though
the metals do not correspond exactly with the Mithraic system.
But there was often a divergence in particular links. A Paris MS
says, for instance, “Zeus, tin; the Persians do not say this, but
iargyros [in Hebrew letters]; Plermes.. . mercury [hydrargyros\■
The Persians [say] tin.” 57 The margin-writer has sought to fill the'
gaps in our text, which goes on mention the initiation-beast, this
time in the form of a drawing:

With all the lustre and force (two lines lost) ... he drew a dragon
eating its tail [the ouroboros] ... images and artworks of a symbolic
character... He advised against opening the door of the secrets to
anyone not of good birth, anyone uninstructed; but thought it right to
keep the divine mysteries for the master’s adepts. It was thus the priests
sealed all the mysteries; then each of them went home to his own land. 58

Of good birth presumably means: born of the families to whom
the lore was restricted. We may compare the statement in the
Koiranides : “Hermes the Thricegreat God took the gift which he
handed on to all men of mind ( noetikoi ). Do not hand it on to men
without right feeling (agnomones, senseless).” 59

What then do we make of Ostanes as an historical figure, the
teacher of Bolos-Demokritos ? He certainly stands for the Iranian
or magian tradition of alchemy, and yet we find him located in
Egypt. He comes there with Demokritos, or he is working there.
His deepest secret, the triadic formula, is found hidden in an
Egyptian holy-of-holies. One list of names calls him an initiate of
Egypt. Demokritos finds his secret, and Pebechios writes to
Persia for the clues to translate his books. His letter to Petasios,
however, clearly gives Asia Minor, the regions where the mages
were thickly settled, as the provenance of the writer.

When we consider how strong is the magian tradition in the
alchemic and botanical lore attributed to him, we feel that these
regions of Asia Minor were the most likely source of his doctrines.

11 is Persian line is stressed by Zosimos, who says that his master
was Sophar the Persian, and who calls Ostanes himself a Mede. 60
As it seems possible that Ostanes was a name borne by many
mages, perhaps a traditional magian name or title, there is no
reason why an Ostanes may not have been the author of the works

I hat went under his name. That the library at Alexandreia under

I I ic Ptolemies acquired large numbers of magian books, presum-
ably many of them from Asia Minor or from more inland areas
such as that of Harran, is attested by the peripatetic philosopher
I lermippos. He says that it had many works ascribed to Zoroaster,
probably at least 800 rolls (2,000,000 fines); and in addition there
would have been many Greek works dealing with magian
doctrines. 61 It would seem than in the 3rd and 2nd centuries b.c.
.11 Alexandreia there went on a considerable fusion of Greek and
I ranian thought. This fusion was expressed by bringing together
die two great figures of Zoroaster the Persian and Hermes-
Thoth the Egyptian in a large new corpus of magical recipes and
ideas, above all in an endless series of pantheist correspondences
bet ween men, animals, plants, stones, stars and planets. We have
seen how Hermes-Thoth haunts the initiation passage-rite of
()stanes, who played his part in the fusion of the two cultures as a
lesser figure than Zoroaster, but one who loomed larger in the
alchemic field. By about a.d. 300, Zosimos the alchemist saw a
conflict between the positions of Zoroaster and Hermes, but this
was no doubt the result of the increasing pressure of the problem
of astrology which seemed to tie all fives down in a rigid deter¬
minism. Zoroaster, he said, agreed with Hermes that men could
raise themselves above fatality, but he took the way of magic;

I lermes on the other hand took the way of self-knowledge. 62
But around 200 b.c. this issue of freewill against determinism had
not yet matured and there must have been many harmonious
minglings of Graeco-Egyptian and Asianic-Syrian ideas, especially
in the field of sympathies and correspondences of one thing with
another. Stoicism with its concept of pneuma was to preside
ultimately over such cultural developments.

This seems the period and the intellectual climate best suited
for the finking of Ostanes and Bolos-Demokritos. The tensions
which later brought about rivalries between the different schools

15B ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

are quieted, and no national jealousies are aroused by the linking
of Ostanes and Demokritos or by the location of the great
secret in Egyptian shrines. Demokritos, the Greek, who stands
between Egyptian and Iranian, is ready to take over the magian
emphasis on fire and on penetrative processes.

It is possible that Bolos dramatised the union of cultures by
telling stories of Ostanes as a visitor or resident in Egypt and by
linking him with Demokritos, the classical philosopher who had
been recognised as the pathfinder, the pioneer, in searching for the
magian doctrines for stimulation or illumination. It is possible that
magian scholars, surrounded with much mysterious aura, had come
to Egypt and discussed things with him, and that they used the name
of Ostanes, as the name of one or more of them, or as the name
of a revered master who had originated their doctrines. The
nearest we can get to what seem the facts is to assume that around
200 b.c. the fusion of Iranian and Greek-Egyptian ideas in Bolos of
Mendes brought about the legends of Demokritos collaborating
with Ostanes—legends that no doubt took various forms, one of
which we have in the story of the opening pillar and the triadic
formula.

Hermes Trismegistos

Wi. have seen how Hermes appears in a shadowy way as the
I nl her of all knowledge, including alchemy. Psellos, echoing
what seems a genuinely old tradition, states that he taught the
science before Ostanes and Pebechios, and wrote a book on it
named Kleida (which seems connected with the title Kids, Key,
given to several such works). He adds, “Anoubis alone interpreted
| / understood] his Seven Books, Heptabiblon, and not even he
, learly.” 1 Several mythical or divine persons of Egypt thus come
up among the alchemists, Hermes-Thoth, Isis, Anoubis, Aga-
tliodaimon.

I lermes is a highly important figure, not only in alchemy, but
in almost all the fields where revelation was involved—and as we
have seen, those fields at this time covered a very large part of
i nil ure. The quest for the truth in a breaking-down society gained
an ever-greater urgency, while in general losing faith in unaided
human efforts. Not only in matters of religion but in those of
a I most any field of inquiry, whether astrology, alchemy, physiology,
botany, iatromathematics (medicine linked with astrology), or
even rhetoric, the seeker turned despairingly to the spiritworld.

’Thus Aristeides records that the god Asklepios advised him in
dreams, not only about remedies for his illnesses, but also about
procedures in rhetoric. The Jew who composed The Wisdom of
Solomon probably lived in Alexandreia; he was strongly influenced
by Greek Hellenistic thought; and he thus described what he
owed to his God:

hi his hand are both we and our words; all understanding, and all
acquaintance with divers crafts. For himself gave me an unerring know¬
ledge of the things that are, to know the constitution of the world, and
I lie operation of the elements; the beginning and end and middle of
limes, the alternations of the solstices and the change of seasons, the
i bruits of years and the positions of stars; the natures of living

-»

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

l6o ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

creatures and the ragings of wild beasts, the violences of winds and the
thoughts of men, the diversities of plants and the virtues of roots; all
things that are either secret or manifest I learned . . , 2

The old oracles had little or nothing to say on things that worried
men apart from immediate practical matters; only the Klarian
Apollo had had anything to reveal on the question of the divine
essence, and the thaumaturge Julian forged documents in imita¬
tion. Men wanted a more direct form of contact, more personal
and more complete. 3 It was their duty to start off on the quest for
the revelation of reality:

There was indeed something worthy of contemplation and of emotional
agitation, the beauty of the heavens with its representation of the god
still unknown, the solemnity of night linked with a light weaker than
the sun s, but still alive, and the other mysteries moving each in its
turn across the sky, giving order and growth according to the motions
and regulated periods of time by certain secret emissions \aporrhoiai\ to
the totality of things here below.

And so fear kept on always increasing, there were indescribable
seekings. And as long as the artisan [technites\ of the universe persisted
in his denial, ignorance enwrapped the whole world. But when he had
decided to reveal himself such as he is, he inspired in gods outbursts of
love, and he spread more generously in their intelligences the light that
he held in his breasts, so that they had first of all the desire to seek him

°Kos» )4 WlU t0 find him ’ then als ° the P ower of succeeding. ('Rare

The Hermetic writings give us the revelation of the supreme
Mind or Nous, of Hermes-Thoth, or of a disciple of Hermes: Tat,
Asklepios, Ammon. The frame, as we have seen, is often that of a
dream. 5 Hermes is thus the great source of revelation:

Hermes saw the totality of things. Having seen, he understood. Having
understood, he had the power to reveal and show. And indeed what he
knew, he wrote down. What he wrote, he mostly hid away, keeping
si ence rather than speaking out, so that every generation on coming
into the world had to seek out these things. (K.K.) e

The term for writing down here is “engraved”. He engraved his
lore, we have seen, on stelai and tables. And so he was taken as
the inventor of writing. Plato knew this tradition well.

Some god or divine man, who in the Egyptian legend is said to be
Theuth, observing that the human voice was infinite, first distinguished

161

in ihe infinity a certain number of vowels, then the other letters which
h,ul sounds, but were not pure vowels [i.e. the semi-vowels]; these too
i Hist in a definite number; and lastly he distinguished a third class of
letters, which we now call mutes, without voice or sound, and divided
tlicsc up, and likewise the two other classes of vowels and semi¬
vowels, into the individual sounds . . . [Finally] he assigned them all to a
single art.

Sol< rates also tells a story he heard at Naukratis about one of the
undent gods of Egypt, whose sacred bird was the ibis, Theuth.
"I le it was who invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry
and astronomy, also draughts and dice, and, most important of
all, letters.” The king at that time, the god Thamos, lived at
Thebes. Theuth came to him and showed his inventions. Thamos
liked some and disapproved of others. When they came to letters,
Theuth said it would make the Egyptians wiser, with better
memories. Thamos replied that an inventor was not always the
best judge of his inventions; as for letters, they would bring
.1 1 » ait the disuse of memories. “Men will trust themselves to the
external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
I ,otters were “a pharmakon [drug, remedy, spell], not of memory,
bui of reminding; and you offer men the appearance of wisdom,
not true wisdom. They will read many things without instruction,
and will thus seem to know how many things, when they are
mostly ignorant and tiresome company—not being wise but only

16. Thoth in Ibis-form with Shu and Tefnut as lions

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

162 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

have the show of it.” At the end of Sokrates’ parable, Phaidros
says. Yes, Sokrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt or of
any other country.” 7

Diodoros sets out the general Hellenistic view:

According to them [the Egyptians], it was by Hermes that the common
language of mankind was first further articulated and many objects
still nameless got an appelation; that the alphabet was first invented and
ordinances dealing with the honours and offerings due to the gods were
properly established. He was the first also to observe the orderly
arrangement of the stars and the harmony of musical sounds and their
nature, to set up a wrestling school, and to give thought to the
rhythmical movement of the human body and its proper development.

He also made a lyre and gave it 3 strings, imitating the seasons of
the year; for he adopted 3 tones, a high, a low, and a medium: the high
rom summer, the low from winter, and the medium from spring The
Greeks were also taught by him the expounding, hermeneia, of their
thoughts and for this reason he was named Hermes. In a word
Osins, taking him for his priestly scribe, communicated with him on
every matter and used his counsel above that of all others. The
o ive tree also, they assert, was his discovery, not Athena’s as the

The Souda says he was the discoverer of metals, especially gold
silver and iron. No doubt this attribution came about through
his place in alchemy. Tertullian for the Christians cited Hermes

rismegistos as the master of all who concern themselves with
nature (scientists of any kind). Iamblichos and Galen rationalised
the legends. The first wrote, “Our ancestors dedicated to him the
discoveries of their science, having agreed to attribute everything
to Hermes.” The latter, “In Egypt, all that has been discovered in
the arts was submitted to the general approbation of the sages; then
it was inscribed without its author’s name on columns kept in the
sanctuary. Hence the multitude of works ascribed to Hermes.” 9
Iambliches put the total of his books at 20,000, according to
Seleukos Manethos made it 36,525. As the second number is
divisible by 1461, the number of years in the Sothic period of the

gyptian calendar, it seems that some astronomic calculations
have intruded.

In ancient Egypt Thoth was indeed the holder of the Divine
Book; but the system of the gods was based on the governmental
administration of the earthly State. The Pharaoh got reports from
is ministers and officials; details of all administrative work were

163

I arefully recorded in writing. So the Sungod, King of the World,
needed a similar system. Thoth as his minister and scribe kept his
Book of Government, not so much as a doomsbook or book-of-
late as a record of the practical side of the god’s dominion. 10

I I 'Ik >th sailed on the Sunboat of Re and had as title Great of Magic
in the Ship of Millions; by his magic he defeated the DragonApepi
(hat sought to swallow the Sun. One of his staffs had an eye
1 hrough which the indwelling god could see. 11 By Graeco-Roman
limes Thoth as the highgod’s scribe had turned into the supreme
philosopher and natural scientist; and as we see from Diodoros,
Re was in some respects supplanted by Osiris. Thoth’s secrets
were engraved and hidden away:

At last he readied the dearcut decision to deposit the sacred symbols of
(lie cosmic elements near secret objects of Osiris, then, after making
as well a prayer and pronouncing such and such words, to return to the
heavens...

“There are those,” said Hermes, “who will thoroughly know all the
secrets of my writings and interpret them, and even if they retain some
1 >f them for themselves alone, others among them that are for mankind’s
benefit they’ll engrave on stelai and obelisks.” 12

Thoth thus had his beneficient aspects, which linked him with the
art of healing. An Edfu narrative of the Birth of the Ogdoad
(eight gods) tells of a shrine of his at Medinet Habu erected by
I’tolemaios IX Euergetes II, where he was called Lord of
I ishmunein and where a healing god Teos was also honoured. In
ibis temple the deified sage Imhotep, identified by the Greeks
with Asklepios, had a cult as well; and this fact has led to the
conjecture that Teos, Dhr, was himself a deified priest of
Memphis. 13 This Dhr, a Sm- priest, may have been the Theban
I lermes whom Clement cited with Asklepios of Memphis as
examples of deified men. But the epithet stm, a late form of sm,
in inscriptions of the temple is used only for Thoth, not for
Teos; it seems an epithet of Thoth as oracular god and healer. 14

In any event there was a cult of Thoth at Thebes long before
1 lie Ptolemaic temple; in the New Kingdom he had been identified
with the Theban moongod Khonsu. It would be natural enough
for a human sage, Teos, if deified, to be honoured in the same
shrine as Thoth, god of wisdom—just as we find Imhotep and
Amenhotep, two more human sages, as shrine-sharers with the
god. In linking Thoth with deified sages, Ptolemaios IX, who

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

164 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

more than any other Ptolemy loved Egyptian lore, did not want
to lessen his role; rather he wished to stress the connection with
human wisdom. In the text of the shrine dedication, Thoth (or
perhaps Teos) is said to descend every evening on the temple as an
ibis and go forth in the morning. It seems then that here was a
place of night-oracles through incubation. Perhaps the main
worshippers were sick folk come to get advice from the god, who
appeared in dreams. Thoth’s epithet here. Atm , he-who-hears
would suit such a situation. 15

The later function of Thoth-Hermes as the great revealer is
perhaps linked with his role in a number of demotic appeals,
which seem to be descendants of the ancient Letters to the Dead.
We find them addressed both to him and to Imhotep. One"
written on a jar, was posted at the grave of three persons (a man, a
woman, and a second man who seems the son of the first). A

165

woman-attendant of the Ibises greets the trio by the name
"before Thoth” and launches out in a complaint to the god about
1 lie seizure of her property by a man she names. Another appeal,
on papyrus, of the Ptolemaic period, was written on behalf of a
boy and a girl minor, complaining of their father’s treatment of
them after the mother’s death and his remarriage. Another
papyrus, also Ptolemaic, is a request by a son to be spared death
through an illness; in return he promises, among other things, to
pay a sum in monthly instalments for the burial of the ibises. 18 A
fourth on a coarse-textured piece of linen (dated to the reign of
Amasis or Dareios I) makes a wild complaint against someone
not of this earth:

Calamity O Thoth, Twice Great, Lord of Hermopolis! O Great
< :<Hindis! O every god who is here! It happened to Esnekenbo son of
I lor, whose mother is Hapertais, from the Hand of the Evil Daimon.

17. The weighing of the heart of Osiris Ani (the deadman Am I. mol) by Anubis and Asten, with Thoth as register, and the

great company of the god-. 1 I Iriiopolis as witnesses

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

l66 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The master is the one who protects his servant who is maltreated.
Protect me from it.

Our Great Lord, I am too old for the troubles in which I stand. He
who is cast into the Justification [?] at an old age [?], those who [are
dead] will be gracious to him and bring him in. Be gracious to me, O
gods who are here. Propitiate for me the gods against whom I have
committed wrongs and propitiate for me my Good Daimon. Cause
them to be gracious to me. Save me from your destruction of wrong¬
doing.

Protect me from the Evil Daimon. Save me from it. Do not give me
to the Evil Daimon. Take me to yourself. Do not give me to it. Save
me from it from this day on. Do not let it come near a person of mine.
Do not let it come near a possession of mine. Do not let another have
power over me except you [Thoth]. 17

The term I have here translated as Evil Daimon appears in demotic
horoscopes in application to the Sixth Hour and is given as
Kake Tjche in Greek, while the term translated as Good Daimon
appears in the opposed Fifth House as Agatha Tjche. The same
terms appear in the sentence: “It is in women that Good Fortune
and Bad Fortune exist upon earth.” Again in a fifth letter the
suppliant has no human master to protext him; he has only the
divine master Thoth; this man works at an ibis-farm. 18

Thoth also appears in healing spells. Thus on the base of
magically curative statue, where are eleven spells against snakes
and scorpions, Thoth appears with a claim to avert poison from
young Horos or from the patient, attributing to Horos the various
parts of the latter’s body with appropriate epithets. 19

The importance of the appeal-letters is that we find Thoth
coming down from his high remote position in the Sunboat and
ready to listen to the most humble cries for aid. None of the
afflicted here ask for a revelation of knowledge, but Thoth is
seen as accessible to human pleas. Since he was supremely the god
of knowledge, it was only a further step, though a bold one, when
he was asked to share out that knowledge, at least among those
who were striving to make themselves worthy of it.

The all-knowing revealer was Hermes Trismegistos. In the appeal
cited above Thoth is the Twice Great. We find the phrase,
megistos and megistos , Greatest and Greatest, on an inscription of
the Greek titulary of Ptolemaios Philopator; and the hieroglypoc
version also agrees in thus describing Thoth. The Rosetta Stone

167

lias Great and Great, megas and megas. A papyrus with royal
lilies of Ptolemaios IV may have a triple megistos to fill a gap. 20
But the triple title certainly occurs on a Greek ostrakon from north
Saqqara: “Greatest and Greatest God and Great Plermes”. Two
more ostraka are of interest, found in a small building to the west
of a sloping dromos cut in limestone that led down to an entry
into the catacombs of ibis-mummies. The building opened out of
the hall from which the dromos ran down; it consisted of a cellar
and niche appropriate to an oracular statue, and we may assume
that a dream-oracle existed here. The date is fixed by the type of
script and the reference to two Ptolemies, VI and VII, and
Kleopatra II, with a joint reign lasting 170-64 b.c . 21 The writer is
I loros, pastophoros of Isis “of the sanctuary in the city of Isis,
Scbennyto”. In one text we have the draft record of an oracle
delivered to him by megistos and megistos god megas Hermes : then a
new draft with some additions that mention “the rulers”; then
1 he writer’s own name and title; finally the god’s triple title again.
I11 another text Hermes is omitted; the form is that of a letter to
the rulers about oracles and an obsure reference to what had been
said: “[The army] of the Egyptians will be routed and the king is
to advance into [or up to] the Thebaid.” Clearly Horos was
writing at the time of some disturbances mentioned in two
fragments of Diodoros. First an Egyptian notable Dionysios
Pctosarapis had tried to cause trouble between the two reigning
brothers in Alexandreia, failed, and retired to the suburb of
Fleusis, where he gathered some 4,000 men. Defeated, he fled “to
the Egyptians”—apparently to the chora or countryside—where he
(irganised further revolt. The second fragment tells of “another
disturbance” in the Thebaid. There is no certainty that this one
links with the first; but we hear that the king overran the Thebaid
except for Panopolis, which the staunchest of the rebels fortified
and which had to be taken by siege. After punishing the rebels,
the king returned to Alexandreia. In our oracle it seems that
I lermes-Thoth is on the side of the Ptolemies, at least to the extent
of prophesying their victory. We see that Hermes could be
appealed to for inf ormation as well as for aid. 22

In ancient Egyptian texts the threefold repetition of a hiero¬
glyphic expressed the plural. 23 The triple titles should then strictly
mean only Hermes the Greatest; but they were taken as meaning
Thrice-Great as is shown by the paraphrase Trismegistos. Magic
papyri of the Hellenistic and later periods used as synonymous with

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

168 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

Trismegistos the surnames Frismegas, Trismegalos, and late
texts expanded the names to Nine-Times-Greatest. 24 There was
no connection with the designation of the pillared busts or
Hermai as Trikephalos, Three-headed; such herms stood at the
crossings of three roads—as the Four-headed stood at those of
four. People who claimed to possess all the parts of philosophy or
other fields of knowledge were jokingly given these names. 25

In the later working-out of the place of Hermes in Egyptian
thought he was divided into two persons. George Synkellos tells
us of Manethos:

In the time of Ptolemaios Philadelphos he was styled Highpriest of the
pagan temples of Egypt and wrote from inscriptions in the Seriadic
Land [Egypt] which had been traced, he says, in sacred language and
holy characters by Thoth the First Hermes and translated after the
Flood into hieroglyphic. When the work had been arranged in Books
by Agathodaimon, son of the Second Hermes [Trismegistos] and father
of Tat, in the temple-shrines of Egypt, Manethos dedicated it to the
above King Ptolemaios II Philadelphos in his Book of Sothis, using the
following words:

Letter of Manethos of Sebenntytos to Ptolemaios Philadelphos:

To the Great King Ptolemaios Philadelphos Augustus: Greeting to
my Lord Ptolemaios from Manethos Highpriest and Scribe of the
sacred shrines of Egypt, born at Sebennytos and living at Heliopolis:
it is my duty. Greatest King, to reflect on such matters as you may
desire me to inquire into. So, as you are making researches about the
Future of the Universe, in obedience to your command I shall set before
you the Sacred Books which I have studied, written by your forefather
Hermes Trismegistos. Farewell, I pray, my Lord King. 26

This letter is not genuine Manethos; Augustus was a title of the
Roman emperors, not of the Ptolemaic kings. But Manethos did
in fact write a History of Egypt, of which we have fragments. As a
Heliopolitan priest, he must have known the Sacred Tree in the
great hall of the temple, where Seshat, the Lady of Letters, the
Mistress of the Universe, wrote with her own hand the names’ and
deeds of rulers. She was shown with Thoth and Atum making
inscriptions on the leaves and fruits of the tree. We find Manethos
and Hermes linked in a list of medical writers in an MS of Celsus.
The list includes Flermes Trismegistos, Manethos, Queen
Kleopatra, Nechepso. 27

In the hermetic Asklepios Hermes refers to his grandfather
Hermes; and Augustine wrote, “At the time when Moses was

169

born, Atlas is found to have lived, that great astrologer, brother of
Prometheus, maternal grandfather of the elder Mercurius, whose
grandson was that Trismegistus Mercurius. 28

The Books of Thoth certainly existed in Hellenistic-Roman
times, if not earlier, since Clement of Alexandreia gives us an
elaborate account of a procession in which they were carried:

The Singer is the one opening the march, bearing one of the attributes
of music. He must know by heart two of the Books of Hermes: the first
that contains the hymns to the gods, the second that sets out the rules of
the royal life. After the singer comes forward the Astrologer who
holds in his hand the clock and the palm, symbols of astronomy. He
must know and have unceasingly on his lips the Books of Hermes
treating of this science. These number four: one deals with the systems
of stars that appear fixed; another on the meetings of the sun’s and
moon’s light; the other two on their risings. In the third place comes the
sacred Scribe with plumes on his head and in his hand a book and a
rule, on which are set also the ink and reed he uses in writing. He in his
turn is held to know what concerns the hieroglyphs, cosmography,
geography, the course of the sun, moon, and seven planets, the
chorography of Egypt and the description of the Nile. He should be
able to recite the sacred instruments and decorations as well as the
places destined for them, the measures, and generally all that belongs
to the ceremonial.

After these three persons comes on the one called the Master of
Ceremonies, who holds a cubit, attribute of justice, and a cup for
making libations. He must be instructed in all that concerns the cult of
the gods and sacrifices. There are ten things that the cult of the gods
and the whole Egyptian religion embraces: sacrifices, first fruits or
offerings, hymns, prayers, processions, festivals, etc. etc. At last, to end
the march comes the Prophet bearing the ewer, followed by those with
the offered loaves. For the prophet is in addition charged among the
Egyptians with the distribution of food. In his role of supreme pontiff
he must know the ten books called sacerdotal. These deal with the
laws, the gods, and all that relates to discipline.

There are then forty-two Books of Hermes extremely necessary:
thirty-six, which hold all the Egyptian philosophy, are carefully studied
by those of whom we have just spoken. As for the six others, which deal
with medicine and treat the body’s constitution, maladies, instruments,
eye-remedies, and finally remedies for women, they are the object of
assiduous study by those who wear the cloak—that is, the doctors. 29

Thoth was indeed at the head of the healing gods. The Egyptians
were much concerned with the toxins created in the body by

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

170 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

food-residues; and Thoth was said to have invented the enema_

just as the ibis used its long curved beak, according to Plinius, to
clean out that part of his gut from which residues had failed to get
evacuated. 30 Horapollon speaks of a scribe distinguishing
between life and death” and of a holy book used by the scribes
and called by them Ambres, “by means of which they decide the
fate of a sick man lying down: whether he will live or not. This
they judge from the position of the sick man.” Ambres is obscure.
An attempt has been made to link it with ini’t-pr as magical
tricks rather than as house-utensil, or with the name of the magi¬
cian cited by St Paul: “Now as Iannes and Iambres withstood
Moses, so do these also resist the truth.” Paul is here drawing on a
Jewish apocrypha which goes back to Hellenistic times; Plinius
puts Moses and Iannes on the same level, perhaps drawing on an
anti-Jewish tract of Apion. 31 Ambres has however also been
derived from an Egyptian term for word or sacred formula, so
that perhaps the reference is to curative magic, a theme in the
books carried by Clement’s pastophoroi. This interpretation seems
better than the linking of Ambres with a gloss of Hesychios:
ambri^ein, “to serve in the sanctuaries”.

Thoth and Tat both appear in spells. Where the Greek sorcerer
called on Apollo for presages, the Egyptian called on Tat, Boel,

or the Moon. Thus an evocation with the aid of a lantern has the
formula:

Boel Boel Boel Boel 1111 A A A A Tat Tat Tat Tat you who spread the
immense light, companion of fire, in whose mouth is an inextinguish¬
able flame, great god who dwells in the fire, who are in the midst of the
flames, in the celestial lake, between whose hands is the divine grandeur
and the divine power, appear to this boy who has today my vase in his
power so that he will reply to me truthfully, infallibly... Descend to the
centre of this fire which is here before you, you who belong to Boel, to
Aniel. 32

We may note the stress on fire. Thoth through his connection
with the Sunboat becomes a sort of guide for the magician.

Launch yourself on high to heavens and make the lofty Good-
spirit sigh after the lofty mistress. Hasten to the eternal waters and
make Thoth wish to voyage. Awaken the desire. .. .” Here the
spell is of love. 33 Another formula for inspiring love in a woman’s
heart opens with Isis complaining to Thoth, called both baboon
and grandfather, that she has found her sister Nephthys in copula-

N 1

1 K. Sckhait, Thoth, and Atum register a king’s name on the Heavenly
Tree, placing the king within it

1 ion with their brother Osiris. The latter section uses the metaphor
(>f metallurgy to bring about the sexual fusion of the lovers in the
embrace:

Bclf, son of Belf, who has feet of copper, talons of iron, fixed with
double nails of iron, who has ... a head, alert feet, a knotted tongue
and a light sword: bring it to me, tempered with the blood of Osiris,
and put it in the hand of Isis . . . This mysterious fire . . . all fire, all
nape-of-neck, all sigh, all plaint, all... that you forge in this stove of
lire, breathe it also into the heart and the liver, into the loins and belly
< >(' N daughter of N. Lead her into the house of N son of N, and let her
C i ve to his hand what is in her hand, to his mouth what is in her mouth,
l o his body what is in her body, to his wand [penis] what is in her womb.
Quick, quick, at once, at once. 34

The metallurgical mystery here is very complex. The summoned
spirit is made of metal; the sword he brings is tempered with
Osiris’ blood; it seems further forged in the fire of the spell, the
fire of love, as in a stove, to enter into body of the beloved; and
ibis magical thrust of the fire-sword becomes the entry of the
lover into the girl’s body.

In the spells Thoth is connected with the number seven. In a

172 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

charm of Agathokles, for the procuring of a dream, we find:

Thoth, whom every god invokes, of whom every demon is
afraid and whose orders every angel obeys. Your name has Seven
Vowels aeetoyo tajoeeao qyeeoia. I utter your famous name, name with
constraining powers of every kind.” 33 i n anot her formula the
magician thus addresses the sun in consecrating the magic ring of

I am Thoth, inventor and initiator of magical means and magic
wnung. Come here to my place, you who are underearth, rise up for me
the greatest demon. Nun of the underworld, and you, gods of Nun of
the underworld for lam Heron, enjoying great glory, the ibis-eye, the
alcon-eye, the phoenix-eye travelling across the airs, enveloped in mire
and . . . skin . . If I do not understand what is the soul of all Egyp¬
tians, Greeks, Syrians, and Ethiopians, and of every other tribe or
nation whatever, if I don’t understand the past and the future if I
understand nothing about their art and occupations, their works and
way of life, their names and the names of their fathers and mothers
brothers, sisters and dead, then I’ll pour the blood of the black
ICynokephaios [dog-headed, Anoubis] into my vase, without hurting
myself, 111 put [the vase] on a new pedestal. I’ll burn below it the bones
of the Drowned One [Osins] and at the port of Bousiris I’ll cry [the
name of] him who remained three days and three nights in the river
[Osins]; the Drowned one, who, carried on the river current, was cast
into the sea and was enveloped by the waves of the sea and by the
clouds of the air. His belly and all his body will be eaten by fishes for I
won t stop the fishes from eating him and they won’t close their’jaws.

111 snatch [Horos] the orphan without father from his mother,
the axis will be cast down and its two ends will come together. 36

The last threat is to destroy the whole universe. We find it in

ancient Egyptian spells directed against crocodiles, where the
magician says:

I, I am the chosen of millions, who have come out of the Duat [under¬
world], whose name is not known. If my name were pronounced on
the nverbank, the river would turn dry. If on the earth, the earth would
take fire. I, l am Shu [god of air], image of Re, who am seated in the
divine Eye of my father. If the inhabitant of the water opened his jaw
or made movement with his claws, I’d whelm the earth in the abyss of
the south would change to the north with a 11 the world as

The belief in Hermes as the revealer of nature’s secrets and of the
divine essence spread wide and lasted long. A strange pocket of

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

173

I Icrmetic beliefs, including much connected with alchemy,
persisted among the Sabians of Harran in Mesopotamia. They
survived as a pagan sect inside Islam, with Syriac as their ritual
language, for at least two centuries, and turned out talismans,
alembics, and astrolabes (needed to fix the times of the five daily
prayers of the Moslems)—though many orthodox Moslem thinkers
disliked magic, astrology, alchemy, as impugning Allah’s omni¬
potence. In the nth century their name was said to be derived

19. Herm in Dionysiac form with implements of worship

from Sab b. Idris, identified with Tat, son of Trismegistos. 38 (We
saw above how among the Arabs Hermes was identified with
Idris or Enoch, son of Adam.) The Sabian prophets were Hermes
and Agathodaimon (Ahaydimon); and they seem to have had a
very large collection of Hermetika, including documents now
lost, at the time they adopted these works as their scriptures. 39
The linking of Hermes and Enoch may have come under Islam;
in any event the Sabians raise a number of difficult problems we
shall later consider. Here we may note that in the Kitab al-nluf the
astrologer Abu Ma’shar (died 886) makes Hermes Adam’s
grandson. Adam taught him the hours of the day and night, and
lie, Enoch-Hermes, first spoke of “upper things such as the
motion of the stars”. He first built sanctuaries, developed
medicine, and wrote many books on earthly and heavenly
subjects. “He was the first to prophesy the coming of the Flood
and he saw that heavenly plague by water and fire threatened the

175

174 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

earth. 4 0 All this is connected with what was said earlier of Hermes
and the Pyramids; and through such traditions it is possible that
the Hermetic TLrater or Bowl later on in medieval times develooed
into the Holy Graal. In Hermes to Tat, The Krater or Monad we are
told that Hermes filled a great krater with Nous, Mind, and sent it
down to earth. “And he has appointed a herald with orders to
proclaim to the hearts of men: Plunge, you who can, into this
bowl here, you who believe you will ascend towards him who has
sent the bowl on to earth, you who know for what you have
come into being.” And so the reborn initiate of Hermes cries, “I
have entered an immortal body ... I am in heaven and on earth,
in water and in air, I am in animals and plants, I am in the womb,'
not yet begotten, and after birth, I am everywhere.” He has
become vitally part of the universe, realising his kinship with all
things and thus entering into them as the alchemist enters in the
metals of transformation.

We may add that the creative voice of Thoth, under the
influence of Hellenistic thought, became the creative Wisdom,
Sophia, of God, which in turn became the Logos, Word or Reason’
of Philon, Neoplatonists, and finally of Christians. Two hiero¬
glyphic inscriptions, under Nero, at Dendera read as follows:

Thoth the great and great, the most ancient, the master of the city
Hermopolis the Great, the great god at Tentyris, the sovran god,
creator of the Good, heart of Re, tongue of Atum, throat of the god
whose name is hidden, lord of Time, king of the years, scribe of the
annals of the Ennead. Revelation of the god of light Re, he who exists
from the beginning, Thoth, he who rests on the truth. What springs
from his heart has at once existence. What he utters subsists for
eternity. 41

Chemistry in medieval times was still called the Hermetic Science;
but no Greek work under the name of Plermes has come down to
us, though we hear of titles of his such as The Work of the Sun. We
have only three fragments and various quotations by Zosimos,
Stephanos, and others. However we can build up a fairly clear
view of his doctrines. First, he is now and then linked with
Demokritos. Hermes and Demokritos are known according to
the Catalogue to have spoken briefly of an Unique Tincture, and
others allude to it. Every sublimated vapour is a pneuma and
such are the tincturing qualities; thus it is that the divine
Demokritos speaks of the whitening and Hermes of the smoke.” 42

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

I lie main stress in his thought seems to be on the unitary nature
ol process.

< >itiers say that the Water is multicomplex, resulting as it does from
two complex unities . . . just as the world is numerically one, though
«(imposed of multiple elements. Thus Hermes declares that the totality
nl things, though multiple, is called One. (The Christian.)

This is the operation \iosis\ of which Hermes speaks under the name:
the Good with many names.

For the truth of my remark I take Hermes to witness. He states:

( io to Achab the labourer and learn that he who sews wheat makes
wheat come to birth. [Zosimos.] 43

Asa result Hermes saw man as a microcosm. Olympiodoros tells
ns:

I lermes imagines man as a microcosm. All that the macrocosm con-
la ins, he also contains. The macrocosm contains creatures of earth and
water; man has fleas, lice, and intestinal worms. The macrocosm has
overs, springs, seas; man has entrails. The macrocosm has creatures of
ilie air; man has gnats. The macrocosm contains exhalations that burst
out in its bosom, for example the winds; man has his flatulences. The
macrocosm has sun and moon; man has two eyes, and the right eye is
related to the sun, the left eye to the moon. The macrocosm has
m< run tains and hills; man has bones. The macrocosm has the sky; and
man has the head. The macrocosm has the twelve sky-signs; and man
contains them too, from the head, i.e. the Ram, down to the feet, which
.ire assimilated to the Fishes. There then is what they [the Hermetists]
(.ill the Cosmic Image \mimema \, as Zosimos notes in his book of
Virtue . 44

This system had been built up out of the mass of correspondences
worked out in terms of the theory of Sympathy-Antipathy,
especially through the merging of medicine and astrology.
Firmicus Maternus in dealing with the offspring of the world—
ilie position of the planets in the zodiacal signs at the beginning
i if things, informs us:

The God fabricating the world has constituted man’s body, like the
world’s, out of a mixture of the four elements, fire and water, air and
earth, so that the happy combination of all these elements makes of the
living a fine work according to the form of the divine model. And by
l he artifices of his creative art he has so made man up that under the
constraint of nature there gathers in a small body [microcosm] every
force and every substance in such a way that at the powerful celestial

HERMES TRXSMEGISTOS

177

176 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

breath that descends from the divine spirit to vivify the mortal body he
prepares a dwelling, fragile indeed, but still resembling the world.

And that is why man, like a little world, is vivified by the flame and
the eternal course of the five planets and the sun and moon, so that the
living being created in the world’s image may likewise be governed by
t ie same substance of the divinity. Hence comes it that the two divine
men who merit every admiration, Petosiris and Nechepso, whose
wisdom has had access to the inner secrets of the divinity, have handed
on to us, instructed as they were by a divine master of knowledge the
theme of the world in its birth-products to declare and prove thsrt man
formed according to nature and the world’s image, is sustained cease¬
lessly by the same principles that direct and sustain the world through
the rays that warm it with a perpetual heat. 45

The source of this declaration, he says, was “the Book of
Asklepios called Myriogenesis”; and Asklepios together with
Anubis, he mentions elsewhere, draw their lore from Hermes
Trismegistos, “the divine master of knowledge”. 46

Hermes seeks to work our correspondences or interlinked
forces of sympathy between various objects or materials. The
effect of the phases of the moon on silver, for instance, or on
magnesia, “which becomes lunar in its nature” Hermes held that
all the materials were alive in some way or other. “Thus the

;u live qualities [of the metallic bodies] take life under the action
1 >1 heat and are chilled under the action of cold. Hence the metal is

< ailed a Living Animal, %oyon empsychon , by the very speculative
I lermes.” 47

The remarks on method show the notion of dynamic and dia¬
lectical process. “If you do not strip the bodies of bodies and if
you do not give body to the bodiless, the expected result will be
void.” (Olympiodoros attributes this statement also to Maria the
Jewess.) 48 It seems then that we can hand over to Hermes the
aphorism linked with that just cited: “If the two do not become
one, and the three one, and the totality of the composition one,

I lie expected result will be void.” 49 These ideas have a close
affinity with those of Demokritos-Ostanes and Kleopatra; and it
is hard indeed to say which writer has priority. Perhaps they all
were drawing on early anonymous traditions. At any rate
Xosimos looked to Hermes as the originator of the notion of the
alchemic process as triadic:

The present [chemical] composition, once set in movement, leaves the

II lute of monad in order to constitute itself as a triad by driving out the
mercury. Constituted as a monad that overflows as a triad, it is a
continuum; but in return, constituted as a triad with three separated
elements, it constitutes the world by the providence of the First Author,

(iause and Demiurge of Creation, who henceforth is called Trismegistos
in the sense that he has envisaged what he has produced, and what
produces it, under a triadic mode. 50

This important statement deepens the triadic concept by applying
11 directly to the moment of change, in which simultaneously
there occur an act of union and an act of expulsion, of negation.
This pattern is not a chance product, is not something that has

< inly a limited application; it is the creative or formative pattern of
.ill process. The alchemist is re-enacting the role of the demiurge.

A late commentator puts the matter in a less comprehensive
form:

The first of the chiefs of Goldmaking is Hermes, called Trismegistos,
who has received this name, not only because the present operation is
made according to three activities of the power, but because he observed
1 hat other operations than this are also made according to three distinct
ontological essences. He it is then who has first written on the great
mystery. 51

Various operations were attributed to Hermes. As we would

178 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

expect from his concern with correspondences, he was interested
m determining the right time for an experiment.

It is necessary also to examine the question of favourable times. The
ptietima he [? Hermes] says, should be separated from the flower by the
sun s action and maceration should continue up to the spring, and then
after that, at every favourable time,^ should be exposed to the
fire, so that the gold may be good for using. Broad sunlight indeed he

accomplished S ^ ^ SayS ’ k ’ S by the SUn that evel 7 thi ng is

Listen to what Hermes says: that the softening of substances apt to
grow softened is made by cold. He has explained himself at length on
this point at the end of Whitening of Lead. He says there also on the
subject of gold: Thus in some sort operates he who prepares the All.”
He has treated there also on the way of sieving the AH by any sort of
sieve whatever. And Agathodaimon hasn’t failed to note the point- for
he names this operation Washing and Purification of the mineral when
pulverised and become liquid, the mineral passes through the sieve or
fi ter. Hermes says: “It becomes like acacia-gum in drops.” But of a
sediment is produced, that’s proof that neither the substances nor the
mineral have been pulverised enough.

Hermes has himself expounded these matters at length in Sieves
when he repeats at the beginning and the end: “If the waters descend’
the sieve itself seems to flow away”. According to the great Hermes, the
waters indeed descend all together, and then at once they remount
through the utensil in which they seem to boil. 52

Lhe operation described in the first paragraph seems to consist of
various treatments of a goldbearing mineral for the purpose of
extracting the pure gold. The spirit, pnettma, would be the product
of sublimation; it is then exposed to the winter-sun to separate
it from the efflorescences or excretions; next to the action of salt
(. natron) then to that of fire. The other paragraphs indicate
recipes of the same sort. Lead-whitening would signify the passage
from lead to silver. As for tinctures we are told:

Hermes has said in effect that by purple and by purple-coloured stone
the ancients meant the rust of copper. Hermes, writing to Pauseris,
said, If you find the purple-coloured stone, know that it’s indeed the
thing [you seek]. You can find it, Pauseris, described in my Little Key.”
Hermes never composed a work on the tincture of stones or purple
but he wrote the Little Key on the composition of komaris according to
the two formulas, so as to clarify the difficulty over the rust. In addition
he was much taken up with quicklime. 53

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

179

11 crules used many symbolic terms: choir-of-gold for chrysokollor,
l|,c Great God for the sun; midge-blood for red kobathia- shells;

I .iy- ( ff-honey for mercury; virgin’s tail; cock-man and mole-man. 54

I I is love of the Sun appears:

The ancients had the habit of making sulphurous substances incom¬
bustible by means of a light fire and whitening materials. What the
lire effects in an artificial way, the effects with the concourse of divine
n.ii urc. And great Hermes says: “The sun which makes all things.” And
llu- same Hermes has not ceased from repeating everywhere, “Expose
In ihe sun,” and “dilute the vapour in the sunlight,” and from one end
In the other [and kai kato\ he mentions the sun. Everything is brought
about in some sort by the action of solar fire, as we have already said.
(Zosimos). 56

A reference by Zosimos interestingly links Hermes with the

I untasies about Fallen Angels which we found earlier in Tertullian,
the Book of Enoch, and the Flermetics.

II is said in the Holy Scriptures, woman, that there exists a race of
demons who have commerce with women. Hermes mentions it in his
I 'hysika —indeed almost all the work, openly or covertly, deals with it.
bis then related in the ancient and divine Scriptures that certain angels
were smitten with women, came down from heaven, and taught them
;i |l the arts of nature. Because of this, says the Scripture, they offended
( bid and dwelt outside heaven; for they had taught men all the wicked
nrts that have no utility for the soul. 56

I lermes then seems to have known the Book of Enoch, as Zosimos
docs. This link would put the Vhysika of Hermes on to a date
sometime in the 2nd century a.d. —unless there was an earlier
1 radition of the fallen angels teaching arts and crafts, which has
been lost to us. St Paul evidently knew of tales about the angels
coming down to copulate with women; otherwise there is no
point in his rebuking the Corinthian women for praying or
prophesying without covered heads. They should be shorn or
covered, he says; woman was created for man. “For this cause
ought the woman to have power on her head because of the
ingels.” 57 No doubt he was thinking of Genesis, where we are told
1 lie sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and
1 hey took “wives of all which they chose”. But he would hardly
have felt that this remote event was going to be re-enacted in
(:< irinth unless there were more topical records of such goings-on.
Still, the statement by Zosimos does make us feel that the

180 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Physika passing under the name of Hermes could not be very
ancient, especially as we are told that the theme of the fallen
angels pervaded the work.

There is another angle from which we can approach the question
of Hermes, that of the Koiranides which form a Bestiary with the
animals studied in alphabetical order. The Short Book of Hermes
Trismegistos is a work by a By2antine editor, who had also brought
together two versions of the Kyranis, that of Hermes and that of
Harpokration. This Book deals also with plants and stones, as was
normal in Physika, e.g. that ofBolos. 58 Further, the prologue of the
Kyranis, in the two editions of Hermes and Harpokration, refers

21. Mithraic cameo: Mithras born from the rock between the dioscures,
surrounded by various symbols, including the cup and bread of his
eucharist, reverse two snakes twined on staff with drinking-bowl, stars,
and altar between note the two more stylised snakes on the outside
with heads going the other way

to an earlier work, the Archaic Book. The connections here are
with Syria rather than with Egypt; both the works of Hermes and
Harpokration give a Syrian provenance. Thus Harpokration says
the book had come from Syria, from the region where the
Euphrates flows, as also had the Kyranis. Both books he mentions
as sunk in a Syrian lake. 69 In the Kyranis we read:

Peewit: a creature that flies in the air, called the peewit. It has a crest of
seven colours, two-fingers-long, which stands up and comes down. It
is itself of four colours, as in relation with the four seasons of the year.
It is called koukouphas or poupos, as is written on the subject in the
preceding work called the Archaic Book. The creature is sacred. 60

There is another reference by Olympiodoros. In reading this
passage we must remember that the alchemists used the term Man

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS l8l

Ini ilie Metal being treated. We hear of copper-man, asem-man
,uul gold-man, and we shall later see the imagery at work in the
vision of Zosimos. In one MS we see the metals and various
substances represented as men and kings shut up in the phials
where the operations are going on. 61

And indeed as for the Man, we can dilute him and transmute him by
projection, as said the Philosopher [Hermes] to Zosimos. He said in
dlcct, “I have demonstrated that this living thing here is on the model
nl i lie cosmic living thing. And again in the Pyramis Hermes, making
,ui enigmatic allusion to the living thing, said that the living thing is in
ilie proper sense the essence of the chrysokolle and of silver. Hermes
recounts in effect that the Man is the Cock cursed by the Sun. He tells
1 1 mt in the Archaic Book. He also mentions there the Mole. He says
1 1 ml: the Mole also was once a Man, but came under God’s curse for
having revealed the mysteries of the Sun [Gold] and been made blind.
And indeed, if it comes to be seen by the Sun, the earth does not
receive it into its breast again until the evening. He says that it’s
because of having seen the form of the Sun [Gold] such as it was [or,
ihe nature of Goldmaking]. And it has exiled the Mole into the black
earth for having broken the rule and revealed the mystery to men. 62

Wc also find a reference to Hermes’ book in a treatise on the
Peony: “It is called consecrated in the preceding book called
The Archaic Book.” The consecration of the flower was by attaching
Id it, with a thread of raw silk, a piece of the skin of seal which
had also been consecrated at the moment of dissection: “as you
have been told in The Sacred Book, in the chapter on dissections.”
Some stones (keramite, siderite, and beryllite) are also somehow
used, and the plant is fumigated in a circle while two prayers are
said; then it has its roots laid bare and is taken up. 63

We meet the seal in other magic relations, as a prophylactic or a
good-luck talisman. The cosmic blood in the following passage
was made from the little black pismires found at the heart of a
( hrysanthemum.

Take then from a sea-seal the hairs between nostrils and jaw, a stone
of green jasper, the heart and liver of a peewit, a radicle of peony or
ylykyside, vervain seed, cosmic blood of the chrysanthemum, the point
of a seal’s heart, and again the crest on the peewit’s head. Then you’ll
Imve a recipe more powerful than all those that have been given. After
k tiling the lot, with a little musk, in a balsam of four ingredients, put it
in the skin of ichneumon or seal or young peacock or vulture, and carry
it, being in a state of purity. 64

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

182 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

We see then that these citations support the view of Hermes as
a strong partisan of the unitary concept of the cosmos, with all
things bound together with correspondences and sympathies
He seems close to Bolos. We cannot prove that his works were
written before the 1st century a.d.; and so on the whole we may
take his Physika and related works (which include the alchemic)
as later than Bolos, the products of a general trend that Bolos
seems largely to have initiated. But this does not mean that there
were not works or aphorisms going under the name of Hermes
much earlier.

, in >U ! d CXpe , Ct the E gyP tian approach to alchemy to be
typified by the works attributed to Hermes, whether they had one
author or several. If this were so, Hermes would be the figure set
up to oppose Demokntos and Ostanes, and would stand for
varnishing, tincturing methods as opposed to alloying. We have

3k l ad L n °T d r t ! ie . definlte existence of ^o schools. A small work

r J T T B °° k ° fS0phe [ Che °P s J the Egyptian and of the

God of the Hebrews, Lord of the Powers, Sabaoth, makes a plain state¬
ment of the opposing views. The corrupted text seems to date
sometime after a.d. 300. The author is a supporter of the Egyptian
way: he wants to obtain gold by means of a simple varnish that
imitates the colour without alloying any parcel of the metal in
question with common metal. He calls this way the Tincture of
Demokntos: also the Tincture with the name of Monad, which
yields the komarts of Sky thia, that is, the red coloration drawn from '
the root of the comarum falustre. The other method, which he
considers imperfect, consists of “making” gold by alloying a
sma 1 quantity of gold with a large quantity of common metal.
This way is the Tincture of Isis, “which Heron has made known”

It corresponds to that set out by Hermes, which is also the waJ
advocated by Isis: to multiply gold by gold, just as the farmer
multiplies wheat by sowing the seed of wheat. (Why Heron appears
in the matter is not clear. There was a god Heron in Ptolemaic
Egypt, of a complex character. For our purposes here it is suffi¬
cient to see him as a form of Horos.) 65

The P ° ok °f So P be 0 P en s with a statement which directly con¬
nects alchemic process with the movement of the soul in salvation:

The True Book of Sophe the Egyptian and of the God of the Hebrews
Lord of the Powers, Sabaoth-for there are two sciences and two
wisdoms, that of the Egyptians and that of the Hebrews—is more
solid than divine justice. Indeed this knowledge and wisdom of the

183

most excellent things has issued from the depth of the ages. No master
Ims produced it; it is autonomous. It is immaterial and seeks nothing
I tom bodies plunged into matter and wholly perishable; for it operates
without itself having to undergo itself any changes. Now you possess it
us a free gift. In effect, for those who save and purify the divine soul
enchained in the elements, or rather the divine pneuma mixed in the
dough of the flesh, the symbol of chemeia is drawn from worldmaking,
h.osmopoiia, by way of example, just as the sun, flower of fire, is celestial
sun and right-hand eye of the cosmos, and as copper, if it becomes
III 1 wet through purification, is an earthly sun, who is king on the earth
ns the sun is in the sky.

The touch about the sun as the right-hand eye of the cosmos is
genuinely Egyptian. “The Egyptians compare the Sun to a King
.mil to the Right Eye” (Sextus Empiricus); “The Sun rules the
licart . . . and the right-hand vision of man, the left hand of
woman” (Porphyrios).

This high-flown language, important in showing how the
alchemist saw himself as a demiurge recovering the secrets of
( reative process, suggests a late date (4th or 5 th century a.d.) for
1 lie treatise; but the distinction it makes between the two schools
'certainly went far back. The Egyptian type of recipe appears in
1 be following from Physika and Mystika, with its two powders
of projection:

Take mercury, fix it with the body [metal] of magnesia or with the body
i >f stibium of Italy or with sulphur that has not passed through fire, or
with aphroselinon, or with quicklime, or the alum of Melos, or arsenic,
or as you like, and throw the white powder on the copper. Then you’ll
have copper that has lost its dark colour. Pour the red powder on the
silver, you’ll get gold. If it’s on gold you throw it, then you’ll have
gold-coral embodied. Sandaric produces this yellow powder as well as
well-prepared arzenic or cinnabar after it has been entirely changed.
Mercury alone can remove the dark colour from copper. Nature
l riumphs over nature.

Still, can we apply at all easily the simple differentiation of the two
schools to the various facts or statements of theory we have
brought together in connection with Demokritos-Bolos and
I lermes? The triadic formula of Ostanes, with its conception of a
progressive state of order developed out of chaos, the primary
black, could not have been devised out of purely tinctorial
methods. It presupposes a genuine chemical series of changes, in
which the whole nature of the fused substances undergoes

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

184 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

qualitative shifts; it presupposes the use of fire as an active force,
disintegrating and reintegrating the substances and their qualities!
Again, both Demokritos-Bolos and Hermes insist on the unitary
nature of process; both are profoundly affected by the sense of
dynamic correspondences and interrelationships, which net the
whole universe and provide a ceaseless and unbroken series of
tensions, of fields of force.

However, there can be no doubt that the two lines of approach
did exist at an early date and that they generated fierce contro¬
versies among the alchemists. But probably various convergences
also began early, and the strict lines of demarcation began to
break down. We may safely take the trio, Demokritos, Ostanes
and Hermes, to represent the fact that from the outset Greek,’
Egyptian and Iranian elements came together, in conflict and in
amity, to bring about the basic concepts of alchemy and to develop
the broad lines of technical approach. At root the conflict was one
between the methods of metallurgy and those of the dyeing or
colouring industries—though many other craft-processes (per¬
fume-making, cooking, fermentation) contributed their quota
of ideas and methods.

We may add two trifles connected with the name of Hermes.
First, an Organon or Instrument for foretelling the issue of sickness
according to a number applied in a certain way. A calculation
was made, starting with the rise of Sirius in the month Epeiph,
and was then referred to the table. The numbers ran from 1 to
34 in Greek, in a special order. A similar Organon was attributed
to Demokritos; and we may compare the system with that men¬
tioned by Horapollon for dealing with illness. 66 Secondly, under
the names of Hermes and Agathodaimon we meet a commentary
on a Riddle about the Stone: “I have 9 Letters and 4 Syllables,
know me. The first 3 have 2 letters,” and so on. This riddle is also
found in the Sibylline Books; it fascinated the alchemists, is
cited by Demokritos and Olympiodoros, and discussed by
Stephanos. Various answers were arrived at: ZoesBjthos (Abyss of
Life), Theos Soter (Saviour God), Anexphonos (Voiceless), Phaos-
phoros (Light-bearing); and later on Cardan and Leibnitz took it to
be Arsemkon. Bjthos , by the way, was the fountain-source of life
in Valentinian theology, throwing off a succession of emanations;
sometimes it was given the name of Charts, Grace. 67
We gain from the Arab alchemists many statements about

185

I lermes, some of which seem certainly of Greek origin. Most
i ill cresting is The Emerald Table of Hermes, a summary of alchemic
1 1 1<>ught, which exists in Arabic and in Latin versions. 68 It cannot

I >c taken in any way as citing early works of Hermes, but it has its
mots deep in Graeco-Roman alchemy, including that of Hermes.

II is mentioned in an Arab work of the 8th century; and in the
I ,atin text the Greek word telesmus is embedded. In one Latin
version the translator tells us that the precious sentences of
I lermes were found by Galienus Alfachim, or the Physician, on a
plaque of emerald in a cave, which was clasped in the hands of
the corpse of Hermes Trismegistos. The reader is exhorted to
keep the text in strict secrecy from all but men of proved good¬
will. Galienus is cited as saying, “When I entered into the cave I
received from between the hands of Flermes the inscribed Table
of Zaradi, on which I found these words.” The name Galienus
lias been taken as Galen, but is seems a corruption of Balinas
(Apollonios of Tyana). Emerald was a term given by Egyptians
and Greeks to almost any green substance, not only the true
beryl, but also green granite and perhaps green jasper. The
emerald vessels of medieval times, however, were made of green
glass, like the emerald table of the Gothic kings of Spain or the
Sacro Catino of Genoa (a great dish taken by Crusaders at the
sack of Caesarea in 1101, which was said to have been brought by
Sheba to Solomon and used at the Last Supper.) The term tpzradi
seems as well to be a variant of a Persian word for an underground
chamber. 69 Variants of the legend declared that the emerald slab
with its precepts inscribed in Phoinikian characters was found
in I lermes’ Tomb by Alexander the Great; or that a woman Zara,
nt times indentified with Sarah, Abraham’s wife, took the table
from the hands of the dead Hermes in a cave near Hebron some
ages after the Flood. The text had a great effect on Western
medieval alchemy; its words were often endowed with talismanic
force and engraved on laboratory walls or interspersed through
writings:

True it is, without falsehood, certain and most true.

What is below is like what is above, and what is above is like what is
below, for accomplishing the marvels of the One Thing.

And as all things were from one thing, by the mediation of one thing,
si > all things were born of this one thing, by adaptation.

Its father is the Sun, its mother is the Moon. The Wind carried it in
ils womb, its nurse is the Earth.

186 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

It is the father of all the Perfection of the whole world.

Its power is integral, if it be turned into Earth.

Separate the Earth from the Fire, the Subtle from the Gross, smoothly
and with judgment. 3

E ascends from the Earth into the Heaven and again descends into
the Earth and unites m itself the powers of things superior and things
inferior. Thus you will receive the brightness of the whole world and
all obscurity will fly far from you.

It is the strong fortitude of all fortitude, for it will overcome every
subtle thing and penetrate every solid.

Thus was the world created.

Hence there will be marvellous adaptations of which this is the
means.

Therefore am I called Hermes Trismegistus, having three parts of the
wisdom of the whole world.

What I had to say about the operation of Sol is completed.

The Table thus states the doctrine of the unity of all things the
common origin of all forms of matter, the common soul or essence
that is to be found underlying all the forms, the belief that all
substances are the result of a developmental process and are thus
capable of undergoing transformation. Sun, Moon, Wind, and
Earth (gold, silver, sulphur, mercury) are seen as the sources of
the Stone, as the main stages of change; and the remark about
up-and-down movement suggests the kerotakis or later Vase-of-
Hermes in which the Stone was held to be prepared. 7 0 (In medieval
alchemy the most important vessel was called Aludel, Hermetic
Vase Vase of the Philosophers, Philosophers’ Egg, and was
shaped like an egg; sometimes it was shown with an enclosing
serpent.) 71 We see then that the main elements of thought in the
lcibk are in accord with the doctrines attributed in Greek MSS
to Hermes.

There are also many citations from Hermes in Arab manu¬
scripts; and some of these can be taken as carried over from the
Greek with reasonable certainty. Thus, we know Hermes as a
philosopher of the Microcosm; and Ibn Umail writes “And so
Hermes [Hurmus] named it [the Egg] Microcosm, from which
and by which this thing of theirs is One. They called it Everything
* e y called it Every Body and Every Drug that is in the Hands
of Men. Greek texts deal with the Parts of the Egg and show that
attempts were made to assimilate or classify all the materials of
alchemy as these parts. “One is All” is a basic Greek aphorism and
is inscribed in the egg-shaped space of Kleopatra’s Goldmaking.

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS 187

1 )rug, pharmakon, was a common term for the preparation meant
l<> colour metals. 72

Again Ibn Umail writes:

llcrmes said, “The thing agrees with the thing nearest to it in its
Nai ure. Then a Child, like to them in appearance, is bom from them.”

K now too that the Humidity is from the influence of the Moon, and
1 lie Oiliness from the influence of the Sun; and consequently the Oil
rises above the Water. The Element of all Heat is Oiliness, and the
element of all Cold is Humidity. The thing that comes into existence

I mm the subtlety of its Element, then becomes gross and strong and
hard in proportion to the moderation of its Nature and in proportion
in the strength which Allah—glorified and honourable is He—has
gra nted to it. Some of it is immoveable and some moveable, and some is
in ilid and some is liquid. This corresponds to the statement of the sage
A 1 as to the King that the Water does not adhere save with that which

I I a s a similar sulphurous constituent in it, and nothing will be found in it
c if a. similar sulphurous constituent except that from which it came into
existence.

11 is just like the words of Hermes: “The thing agrees with the thing
nearest to it.” He followed this with his words “in its Nature” and did
not say “other than its Nature;” and this is manifest and clear from the
words of Hermes. The Stone of the Sages is [produced] from it, and by
11 it is perfected. 73

Here we have an echo of the Ostanes-formula about a nature
rejoicing in a nature. What Ibn Umail is bringing out is that
.iliiicmic combination is not just the union of any two substances;
the latter must have a living relationship to one another, a dialec-
lical unity, before their coming-together can be productive of a
qualitative change. We do not know in Greek MSS a reference
lo Oiliness as the Element of Heat; but in an Arabic treatise of
I femes to his son Tat, Hermes defines Oil, the Master of Water, as
existing midway between Water and Fire, and asserts that through
Oil or the Oils there is a close relationship between mercury,
sulphur, and fire, “just as the Fire is kindled in the Oil, so also
is it kindled in the Sulphur.” It is therefore quite likely that Greek
theory did deal with the function of Oiliness.

The notion of Up-and-Down, And kai Kato, is important in
Greek alchemy: on the one hand because of the microcosmic
image in which things below reflect things above or correspond
with them, and on the other hand because in processes such as
distillation and condensation the produedon of vapour and water

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

188 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

seemed to reflect the evaporation, mists, clouds, and rains seen

at work in a circular movement between earth and sky Ibn
Umail says: y

Regarding this Spiritual Water and the Sanctified and Thirsty Earth
Hermes the Great, crowned with the Glorious Wisdom and the

that the e Hi le L nCe ^ jt is > indubitable, certain and correct

that the High is from the Low and the Low is from the High They

fromtiat°o T th /° Ugh Ae ° ne ” i ust as things are produced
° l E i SenCe by . a SIn S le preparation. Later, by his statement

a 1 J fu h % 1S h i e mu and ltS m ° ther is the Moon >” he meant their Male
and their Female They are the Two Birds that are linked in the pictures

S D hi2lT Ven r 0f C begl T ng ° f the 0 P e radon; and from them the

the operaSon'! “ And similarIy they afe at *e end of

Cross 6 ” ? hlS Stat f me f’ “ T , he Subtle is more honourable than the
th °i’ l m m nS i y * he , Subtle the Divine Spiritual Water; and by
oss the Earthly Body. As for his later statement, “With gentle¬
ness and wisdom it will ascend from the Earth to the Sky, and will take
re from the Higher Lights,” he means by this the Distillation and the
raising of the Water into the Air.

As for his later statement, “It will descend to the Earth, containing

in of S,e S Al ? f gh , and the Low ’” he means by this the breathing

elevation m th Y"® ° f ? C Spkit & ° m k ’ and its subsequent

elevation to the highest degree of heat, and it is the Fire; and the Low

22. Mammiform figures on staff with snakes undulating across and
figure with two crossed snakes from the Book of the Underworld
(tomb of Osorkon II at Tanis)

189

is 1 he Body, and its content of the controlling earthly power which
Imparts the colours. For there lie in it those higher powers, as well as
1 lie earthly powers, which were submerged in it. The natural operation
.mil decay causes it to be manifest, and hence the strength of the Earth,
mid of the Air, and of the Higher Fire, passed into it.

I ,ater he said, “It will overcome the High and the Low, because in
it is found the Light of Lights; and so the Darkness will flee from it.” 71

This is a commentary on the Emerald Table and brings out the
significance of the movement up-and-down, down-and-up. The
use of the term, the Raising of the Water, occurs in Greek as early
.is Demokritos-Bolos’ Physika and Mystika-, and the term Bird for
1 volatile substance is found in Zosimos. 75 Thus Ibn Umail
remarks further on this point:

A ras in his discussion with Quisar, King of Rum, regarding this White,
< Hear, Red, Hidden Water, spoke as follows, “Hermes said, ‘It is
necessary to extract the Spirit with gentle fire because this Spirit,
whose extraction must be carried out by a gentle fire like [the heat of]
,1 brooding bird, is the Spirit that imparts Tinctures to the Natures and
lorments the Natures because its sulphur was [formerly] combustible,
hut now becomes incombustible and tinctures like the Tincture of
Purple; and it is the Spirit of the Bodies because it is a Spirit that has
been extracted.’ ” 76

The ITeat of the Brooding Bird is prescribed in the Dialogue of
Komarios and Kleopatra. We may recall also how Hermes in Greek
texts liked a slow and lengthy operation, and preferred the use of
sun-heat.

Such quotations as these from Ibn Umail, which might be
11 mltiplied from his writings or from those of al-Razi and Maslama
,il Majriti, show that there was among the Arabs a genuine
literature of Hermes, translated from or closely connected with
(I reek works, as well as a large amount of treatises which merely
used the name of the master to gain prestige. They do not add
much to the picture given by the Greek passages, but help to
c( mvince us of the importance of the Hermetic side of the alchemic
1 radition.

Before, however, we pass on, it is of interest to note that the
notion of up-and-down, down-and-up, as distinct from that of
the lower world merely reflecting the upper, is to be found in
ancient Egyptian thought. The caduceus of Hermes has prototypes
that can be found in early eastern imagery, from India to Egypt.

190 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The rod or staff can be linked in a general way with the sacred
Tree, Mountain, or Ded-pillar that are prominent in Egyptian
mythology and ritual; and much light is cast on the inner meaning
of these symbols by Indian ideas. There we find the idea of an
invisible canal called nadi in Sanskrit (from nada, movement).
Various translations have been made of the term: subtle canals
(tubes), luminous arteries, psychic canals or nerves. There were
many nadi, but three chief ones: Ida, Pingala, and Susumna. The
last-named, the most important, corresponded to the vertebral
column, Brahma-danda : “the microcosm of the macrocosm.” It
was the great road for the movement of the spiritual forces of
the body; and around it were twined, like the two snakes on
Hermes’ staff, the two other nadi, Ida on the left, female and passive
and Pingala on the right, male and active. On the top of Susumna
at a point corresponding to the top of the skull, shone the Sun!
Along the central axis were located six main centres or cakras
(circles, wheels, represented in the shamanist rituals of Central
Asia by the six cuts made in the Tree before which the shaman
falls in his possessed fit of initiation and which in turn represent
the six heavens through which he ascends, with mimed episodes
at each stage.) At the base of the spine, like a snake coiled in its
spirals, sleeps Kundalini, the “igneous serpentine power”, which
awakens during the initiation and rises up, from base to top,
through the various cakras till it reaches Sahasrara , located at the
suture on the crown where the two parietal bones meet. This
aperture, the Brahme (Brahme-randhra), is the place where “the
Sun rises.” The original text thus expresses the imagery: “The
Bride [Kundalini] entering into the Royal Highway [the central
nadi] and resting at certain spots [the six cakras ] meets and embraces
the Supreme Bridegroom and in the embrace makes springs of
nectar gush out.” A Brahmin of Malabar, speaking of the Dravi-
dian caduceus, said. The snakes that enlace represent the two
currents that run, in opposite directions, along the spine.” 77
But can we definitely transport these notions into ancient
gypt? It seems that we can. Take such a representation as that
from the tomb of Ramses VI of a staff on which stands a mummi¬
fied figure; between him and the staff-top is a pair of horns, and
wriggling across the staff, lower down, in opposite directions, are
two snakes. The dead man, at the last Hour in the Book of the
Underworld, leaves his mortal remains, sloughs them, and is
reborn as the scarab Khepri. A stele sets out the idea: “Homage

HERMES TRISMEGITSOS

191

in you, Mummy, that are perpetually rejuvenated and reborn.”
The horns on top of the staff are called Wpt, “summit of the skull,
to open, divide separate”—that is, the parietal bones are thought
of as opening to release the reborn dead-man. IPyValso means the
Zenith of the Heaven. A figure in the tomb of Osorkon II at
Tunis stands with a snake in each hand; the snakes criss-cross in

I heir undulant movement, forming an X across the body. A
symbol often cut on scarabs and scaraboids is that of the Ded-
pillar with a snake hanging on either side, the heads going in
opposite directions. The word Imakh (Blessed) in its ending and
especially in its determinative is represented by the spinal column
with an indication of the medulla; the ending also denotes the

< anal or channel of the spine of the snake through which the
Sun passes—the Night Sun in the Underworld. So the one symbol
brings together the ideas of Blessedness, Spine, Spinal Canal
(of the Sun). The Sun emerging at the end of the snake staff is
both the dead man reborn and the newborn Sun (Khepri); the
dead man emerges from the spinal column at the top of the skull,
.md is reborn—the sun emerges from the spinal night-canal and
Is reborn; the dead man and the sun are one. We may add that
Ml, which means the Back, the Spine, and which enters into the
g< >d name Besa, is homonymous with Sa, which means Protection.

I'lie determinate connected with Imakh appears also in Pesecp,
which takes on the meaning of both Spine and Illumination—a
meaning attested from the time of the Pyramid Texts. The root
Una of Imakh merges again with the homonymous Tree assimi¬
lated to the Ded-pillar and expressing the luminosity of the sun. 78

We see, then, in ancient Egyptian thought a system closely
analogous to that of India which we discussed. The individual
spine and the world-pillar are identified; there is a concept of
life-forces moving up and down this axis; the skull top is also the
sky-zenith; the new birth of the life-force is one with the rising of

I I ic sun. The microcosm-macrocosm relationship is very close to
what we find in alchemy, but with the latter the whole system

< >perates on a new and higher level of philosophic and scientific
lliinking.

In Greek thought we do not find anything so precise as the
systems in Sanskrit and Egyptian; but with the growth of ideas
about the pervasive pneuma the notion of forces descending into
1 lie body and ascending out of it appears. Porphyrios cites an
Oracle of Apollo:

192 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The stream separating from Phoibos’ splendour on high
and enveloped in the pure Air’s sonorous breath
falls enchanted by songs and by ineffable words
about the Plead of the blameless recipient:
it fills the soft integument of the tender membranes,
ascends through the Stomach and rises up again
and produces a lovely song from the mortal pipe.

Porphyrios comments that the descending pneuma enters into the
body, and, using the soul as a base, gives out a sound through
the mouth as through an instrument.” We are reminded of the
ecstatic noises of the Gnostics which were thought to echo the
music of the spheres. The lovely song from the mortal aulos
seems to go straight up to the celestial source of pneuma in the
sun. The down-and-up, up-and-down pattern is completed. 79

Perhaps a confused version of the ideas we saw associated with
Imakh, Sa, Pesedj, appears in a magical intaglio of terracotta where
we see a serpent twining round a star-topped staff; parallel with
the staff rise an altar surmounted with a staff (starred at either end)
on the right and a schematic human form standing on its head on
the left. Here there seems depicted an up-and-down flow of
forces. On a blue-flecked onyx a monstrous figure (with scarab-
body, human legs, head of a maned animal) stands crowned, hold¬
ing in each hand a staff round which a snake twines. One staff
has a goat-head, the other a dog-head; and under the creature’s
feet is an Ouroboros enclosing a man, perhaps ithyphallic and
what seems a thunderbolt. The head of the Ouroboros is down at
the bottom. The crown is made of a disk set on long horns and
flanked with four uraei. There seem here defined two contrary
motions: one of the scarab-sun (upwards to the large crown), and
one of the cosmic serpent (downwards into the underworld of
death). Interpretation of such obscure objects cannot but be
doubtful, though there does seem a link with the complex of
ideas and images we have discussed. 80 A passage in Hippolytos’
account of the Peratai also reveals this complex in a slightly
confused form. Pie is discussing an up-and-down movement.
The Son, he says, brings down from above the paternal Signs and
again carries aloft those Signs when they have been “roused from
a dormant condition and made into paternal characteristics—
substantial from unsubstantial being; transferring them hither
from thence”. The Son’s cerebellum is “in the form of a Serpent”,
that is, a serpent-head, “and they allege that this, by an ineffable

HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

193

,hhI inscrutable process, attracts through the pineal gland the
pneumatic and life-giving substance emanating from the vaulted
1 lumber [? both the skull and the heavenly vault]. And on receiv¬
ing (his, the cerebellum in an ineffable way imparts the Idea, just
as lhe Son does, to Matter; or, in other words, the seeds and genera
11I filings produced according to the flesh flow along into the
spinal marrow.” Though the description is unclear, the idea of an
up and-down, down-and-up flow of pneuma is certainly present,
as also that of an entry of divine force through the cerebellum into
file spinal column. The Peratai thus interpreted the phrase, “I am
fiic Door,” in John . 81

We may add that the idea of the staff of Hermes as a resolving
i >r balancing power between two opposing principles (the snakes)
appears in a tale, given by Hyginus, that Mercury saw two snakes
lighting in Arcadia and put his staff between them, thus arresting
fiic conflict; hence the caduceus as an emblem of peace. 82

nvcot

'A&* - .

d/y?'y tsir f immjlU-

t luHJUUL

/xp ? «Y7ri'r&J\4.
d&jnTt c tK£K,Arrjj-tw

<^Xf7 rtH5vtK ' t | 8M ^

23. Combinations of signs to express modifications of gold

Isis plays only a slight part in alchemic literature apart from one
work, which we have in two versions. The opening mythological
sections differ, but the more purely alchemic content is the same
in both versions and has been taken to date closely to the main
Demokritean texts. The title is Isis the Prophetess to her Son Horos
and the narrative deserves quotation in full. The two versions do
not differ radically, but where it has seemed advisable to add a
passage from the version I have not used, I have done so in square
brackets.

You, my Son, you decided to set out for the battle with Typhon so as
to dispute with him the kingdom of your father. As for me, after your
departure, I went off to Hormanouthi, where the Sacred Art of Egypt
is practised in secret. And after staying there a long enough time I
wished to come back.

Well, when I was about to leave, one of the prophets or angels who
dwell in the first firmament caught sight of me [by the permission of
a favouring season and according to the necessary movement of the
spheres]. He advanced towards me and wanted to mate with me in the
intercourse of love.

[He was just about to do as he wanted] but I refused to yield I
demanded first from him that he should tell me of the preparation of
gold and silver.

However he answered that he wasn’t allowed to explain such matters,
for this mystery went beyond every description. [But next day there’d
come to me an angel, his superior, Amnael, and he would be powerful
enough to reply to my question.]

Next day there came to me the first angel and prophet among them,
by name Amnael, and once more I questioned him on the preparation
of gold and silver.

He however exhibited a certain sign that he had on his head, and
a vase that had not been coated with pitch, filled with transparent water
which he held between his hands. But he refused to tell me the truth’

ISIS

x 95

Next day, having returned towards me, Amnael was seized with
desire on my account and [unable to contain his impatience] he hastened
I (> achieve the object for which he had come. But as for me, I deliberately
took no notice [and did not ask him about those things].

l ie however did not stop from trying to win me over and to invite
me to the business, but I refused to let him take me. I triumphed over
his lust till he was ready to show me the sign on his head and reveal to
me, generously and without hiding anything, the sought-for mysteries.

So he decided then to show me the sign and reveal the mysteries. He
began by retailing the warnings and the oaths—-and this is how he
phrased it:

“I adjure you by heaven and earth, light and darkness. I adjure you
by fire, water, air and earth. I adjure you by the height of the heaven
and by the depth of the Tartaros. I adjure you by Hermes and Anubis,
and by the roaring of the Serpent Ouroboros and of the Threeheaded
Dog, Kerberos, guardian of Hades. I adjure you by the Ferry and by
I he Boatman who crosses Acheron. I adjure you by the Three Goddesses
of Fate, by their Whips and by their Sword.”

When he had made me swear by all these words, he went on to
enjoin upon me that I must never communicate the revelation to
anyone except you, my beloved and legitimate son [so that he might be
you, and you, he].

So go then, my child, to a certain labourer [Achaab] and ask him what
lie has sown and what he has harvested, and you will learn from him
that the man who sows wheat also harvests wheat, and the man who
sows barley harvests also barley.

Now that you’ve heard this discourse, my child, learn to comprehend
I lie whole fabrication, demiourgia, and generation of these things, and
know that it is the condition of man to sow a man, of a lion to sow a
lion, of a dog to sow a dog, and if it happens that one of these beings is
produced against the order of nature, he has been engendered in the
state of a monster and cannot subsist.

For a nature rejoices another nature, and a nature conquers another
nature.

| So then, having shared in this divine power and been favoured with
this divine presence, illuminated in turn as a result of Isis’s demand]
we must prepare the matter with the aid of minerals alone without
using other substances [and attain our goal by the fact that matter
added was of the same nature as that which was prepared]. Just as. I
have told you, wheat engenders wheat, man engenders man, and simi¬
larly gold engenders gold.

See, there is the whole of the mystery.

Then, having taken some mercury . . . l

And recipes for operations follow.

ISIS

7 97

196 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

We find there, in truncated form, the triadic formula of Ostanes-
IJemokritos; but the main bias of the doctrine is towards Hermes
with his insistence that like begets like. Further, Hermes used the
parable of Achaab, a name we do not seem to meet in the Jewish
tradition, though the general principle of like from like is found

telkf^ Pr ° Verbs ( xxii 8 ) and /^ (iv 17 )- Olympiodoros

And Zosimos says in tlie book According to Energy: “For the truth of my
words. I take Hermes to witness. He declares: Go to Achaab the
labourer and learn that he who sows wheat brings wheat to birth.
Similarly I too have told you that substances are tinctured by substances
as it is written: as to the tincturing, it is divided into two kinds the
bodily and the incorporeal. The Art limits itself to these two kinds. 2

The formula “so that he may be you, and you, he”, occurs in a
magical papyrus and in a Prophecy of Zoroaster surviving in Syriac
texts. 3 The latter deals with the prophecy by Zaradoust of the
virgin-born saviour whose birth will be marked by a brilliant
star. “He will rise up from my family and my line. I am he and he
is , am in him and he is in me.” Zarathustra is defining the
saviour, Saoshyant, as his avatar; he has himself received in the
Avesta the title Saoshyant that is to mark the world-renewer. 4 In
our text it seems then that Horos is in some sort an incarnation
of Amnael—unless all the true practitioners of the art are from one
aspect spiritually identified with one another. Just as the devotee
of a mystery-religion might seek to become the god, the bacchant
to become a bacchos, so the true alchemic seeker became Hermes,
Ostanes, Demokritos, or whomever he took to be the divine
founder of his art. He became, in fact, the Alchemic Man. We may
note that in the Syriac prophecy cited above the saviour is des¬
cribed: “You, my Son, you the seed of life, issue of the treasure
Lor storehouse] of light and of spirit, that has been sown in the
soil of fire and water.” This Iranian imagery would serve very

well as a description of the vital seed, the egg or the divine water
of alchemy. 5

The name Amnael does not appear in the Book of Enoch or in
ynkellos. It means: El-has-declared. Perhaps it appeared in some
Egyptian version of the Fallen Angels who teach the crafts to men.
Attempts have been made to identify the angel here with Hermes.
Also with Agathodaimon and with the Egyptian god Psais, who
could be called Heron in Greek. As Isis seems to belong to the

school of Hermes, it would be most plausible to take Amnael as
I lermes, the original revealer of her kind of doctrine. 5 There is
also a tradition making Isis the daughter of Thoth. Ploutarch
Hlates:

M any have made her out to be the daughter of Hermes; many others, of
Prometheus, whom they hold to be the inventor of wisdom and
loreknowledge, while Hermes invented grammar and music. So, of
1 Ik- Muses at Hermopolis [Hermes’ Town] they call the foremost one
|. 4 j s and Justice-Wisdom. And they show the divine mysteries to such
,1:1 ilr e truly and rightfully styled Carriers-of-sacred-things and Wearers-
nl sacred-robes: these are those that carry in the soul, as it were in a
copper, the sacred stories of the gods that cleanses the recipient from
all superstition and magical follies. . . . 6

I Icrc we find Isis and her mysteries connected with the temple of
I lermes; and we may note the odd metaphor of the soul as a
( i >pper in which are put the genuine myths that have a cleansing
elicet—apparently by boiling or some such process. The magical
papyri show Thoth-Hermes aiding Isis with his counsel to find
her brother Osiris. Diodoros cites from his supposed stele , “I

an) Isis, Queen of every land, she who was instructed by Hermes.. .

The aretologies use the same opening, “I am Isis, the mistress of
every land. I was taught by Hermes and by his aid I found out
demotic letters, so that all things should not be written with the
same letters.” 7

'Hie formula of you-as-he, he-as-you, is found in Hermetic
lexts. Hermes to his Son Tat deals with the revelation of a god:
that is, with the process of initiation. The author deals with the
creation of a human being in the womb: “examine with care the
techne of this production, demiourgemata , and learn to know who
fashions, demiourgon , this beautiful and divine image, eikon, that
is man.” Then, turning to this divine craftsman, he cries:

When shall I sing you ? One cannot conceive season or time that concern
you. And for what shall I sing you? For the things you have created or
1 hat you have not created? For those you have made appear or those
you have hidden? And on account of what shall I sing you? As be¬
ll inging to myself, as having something all my own, as being other than
you? For you are all that I am, you are all that I make, you are all that I
say. 8

These passages confirm the idea that the drama defined in Isis the
Prophetess is that of revealing god and initiate.

ISIS

199

198 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

In general Iris is represented as teaching her son Horos
Dtodoros describes how she manifests herself fs a healer “Stand¬
ing above the sick m their sleep, she gives them aid for their

se veTi her »°sf "P°° »ch as submit them-

selves to her. She discovered the pharmakon of immortality and

S°«Svh, h “h’*\ Titans ' attack . *><= was found under

mor ' rtlf 8 f hB SOU ' and also mali “B “>» ™-

. “}' (^ ere ar e several confusions there: Horos is merged

with both Dionysos and his father Osiris; and the idea that Isis

randent^od 0 ^ 1 ^ " deflVation from ma gical practices. He was
“L , fu hlS ,° Wn rlght ') Di °doros adds that Horos
instructed by his mother Isis in both medicine and divination’

thfOUgh his ° rades and his heal-’
; w T e Hei “ etlc books ca «7 on the tradition of the aretolo-
gies that Isis as the great civilising teacher was herself taught by

Hermes. In the Rare Kosmou she tells at length of the mission
carried out by herself and Osiris, and defines his lore in t“m s of
the analogy of Above with Below, of Macrocosm with Micro¬
cosm, which was a part of the alchemic creed.

There are those who, having learned from Hermes that the atmosphere
is full of daimons, have engraved it on hidden stelai. P

lere are those alone, who, instructed by Hermes in the secret
ordinances of God, have made themselves the initiators of the arts
sciences, and occupations of all sorts for mankind. They it is who’
faming from Hermes that all thing, below have received ftL SS
institutesT of beln s ln sympathy with those on high have

f “ C,i ” S b “”‘ l “P vertically with the

Mithraics) or on the arm or hands. On a kylix with white ground
l lie Thracian Mainad who kills Orpheus is tattooed with a little
slag on the upper part of her right arm; another vase has a Mainad
pursuing Orpheus—she is tattooed on the right arm and both
insteps with a ladder-pattern. 13 The ritual practice was later
interpreted as a punishment for the death of Orpheus; and
I’loutarch tells us the husbands of the guilty women tattooed
1 hem for their crime and later husbands continued to do likewise
with their descendants right down to his time; he comments that
he cannot praise them as long-protracted punishment is “the
prerogative of the deity”. 11 But Isiacs had their heads shaven, so
1 hat Amnael might well have been tattooed on the brow or skull.

()ath and tattooing are connected in a papyrus. 15

This account is worth citing since it brings out the close
relation of such a text as ours about Isis and Amnael to initiation-
experience. The oath is fragmentary, but may be amended some¬
thing like the following:

11 11 the name of the god who separated Earth from Heaven, [Light
Horn Dark], Day from Night, [World from Chaos] Life from Death,

| and Generation] from Corruption, I swear [in all good faith] to keep
| among the secrets] the Mysteries transmitted to me [by the very
pious] Father Sarapion [and the most reverend] Sacred-Herald Ka . . .

| on whom this] devolves, and by my Fellow [initiates and my dear]
brothers. Faithful to my oath [may I fare well, but] may the contrary
befall me [if I reveal anything of it all] . . .

Kautau [pates? . . . with the aid of needles] sharpened [has tattooed
on my two hands] seals [so as to] mark [the mystery for ever . . . Then]
to the initiates the Father will tell [the sacred discourses or logoi}.

us the prophets can use philosophy (the occult sciences) at

magem l Practices, “to nourish the soul and medicine 1

cure the afflicted body”. e 1

tinn h Sni S ° nC T" 6 POi , nt ! n the tale of Isis that needs consider:
a'? ~ e _ em P hasls 18 !aid on the sign, seme ion, on the head c
Amnae . Semeum means some distinctive sign, especially one of
physical nature “The High Priest inquired of the leadet
ere present if the child had a semeion, and they replied that h
was without a sign, asemoR (a text dated a.d. 171) u Here w
would expect the sign to be a tattoo-mark, such as wi pu, on th
initiates of various mystery-cults: those of Mithras, Attis Dionyso<
Atargatis. Often the tattooing was done on the bro 4 s (as lit]

Despite the mutilations the essential points are clear. The sect
in question has been taken as Kabeiric (by the emendation made
of Ka . . .) or as composed of devotees of Sarapis (by the emenda-
l ion of Ka . .. as Kanopos.) However, it seems more likely to be
Mithraic, despite the comparative lack of remains left by that cult
in Egypt. The Mithraics had the title of Father for a high stage of
initiation, they also had sacred heralds. The hierokeryx played an
important part at Eleusis, assisting at the initiations, calling for the
holy Silence, and reciting the secret formula the initiates repreated
after him. We also find him joined with priests at the oath-taking
required from functionaries; and he was often named in connec-
1 ion with mystery-cults, e.g. at Andania. Kautau ... is probably the

JOO ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

start of an unusual form of Kautopates, who in the Mithraic
mysteries stood for the Setting Sun as opposed to Kautes, the
Sun of the Morning.

We may note also an odd passage in Dion concerning Augustus
and the year 7 a.d.

He made a vow with reference to the Megalensian Games; for some
woman had cut certain letters on her arm and pracdsed a kind of
divination. He knew well indeed that she had not been possessed by a
god but had done the thing of set purpose. Still, as the populace was
terribly worked up over both the wars and the famine, which had now
set in again, he too affected to credit the common report and proceeded
to do something which would make the crowd cheerful. He regarded
such measures as necessary.

There is a further aspect of Amnael. Perhaps in a primitive
version of the encounter he was simply a revealing god, Hermes;
but here his advent has been linked with the Fall of the lustful
Angels. Not that the mystery-revealer might not exact a sexual
price for his secret. Clement of Alexandreia says that the Dionysiac
Phallus was the emblem of the god’s intercourse with a person
who told him the way to the Underworld.

Dionysos was anxious to go down into Hades, but did not know the
way. So a certain Proshymnos promises to tell him, not without
payment. The price was not a pretty one, though Dionysos thought it
was. The god was asked to enjoy the fellow; and he swore, in the event
of returning, to do to Proshymnos what he wanted, conforming his
promise with an oath. Learning the way, he went down, then returned
He didn t find Proshymnos, who was dead. To fulfil the vow to his
lover, Dionysos hurried, all agog, to the tomb. Cutting a branch from a
fagtree at hand, he shaped it as a penis and then carried out his promise
to the corpse. As a mystic memorial of this Passion phalloi are set up to
Dionysos in cities.

The descent into the Underworld has its ritual mime in the passage
of the phallus into the bowels of the corpse, into the cavern of the
dead. (The word, proshymnos, only occurring thus as name would
mean something like “a hymn sung in addition”; the verb
proshymnem' means “to sing besides”. Proshymnos thus suggests
the personification of some moment of ritual celebration.) To
enter into a mother-goddess would be to go down inside the
earth, into the cave-womb or secret chamber of initiation. How¬
ever that may be, in one of our texts an effort has been made to

ISIS

201

connect the Angel in a precise way with the movement of bodies
or sphere in the sky. We are told that he needed to revolve
round to the correct point in time and space before he could see
Isis, and, it follows, he could descend, only at that moment and
position. Here it seems that an unconsidered effort has been made
lo link revelation with astrologic position; and we could assume
that the lesser angel represents the spirit of a dekan or some
smaller measure of sky-time, while Amnael represents the spirit
of a planet. But there is no precedent for such a spirit leaving his
post on a mission of revelation or a love-adventure, so that we
can only assume that the author of the text in question has over¬
reached himself in trying to work out a precision which ends by
becoming illogical. There is no need then to interpret the sign as
a planetary symbol or something of the sort set on the angel s
head, e.g. the waterplants on the head of the Waterman,
Aquarius (Waterpourer in Greek) in his Egyptian guise. 16
Aquarius is shown holding two water-jars; Amnael has one such
jar, which has no role in the story unless it is intended to define
his character as an inhabitant of the first firmament, Still, there
seems no point in linking Amnael with Aquarius. More likely
1 he picture is that of the Egyptian prophet who bore the sacred
vase of Isis in procession. 17 Apuleius calls this hydreion or water-jar
“the revered effigy of the godhead”—

not formed like any beast, bird, wild thing or human shape, but, the
result of a sagacious invention and by its very novelty something to be
venerated and an ineffable emblem of a religion of a higher kind,

1 hat should be shrouded in a great silence: and so fashioned in glittering
gold: a vessel wrought with hollow bottom, hollowed with the utmost
skill, with pictures outside marvellously done in the Egyptian style;
the mouth not very high but jutting in a long funnel; on the other side
a handle which stuck far out, on it standing an asp rearing its swelling
and scaly neck, and entwining it all as in a knot . 18

In an Isiac procession (in the Vatican) we see the priest holding
with both arms, before his chest, a large oinochoe decorated with a
uraeus-head at the point where the handle joins the orifice. This
hydreion, which Apuleius says represented Isis herself, certainly
held the holy water of the Nile. 19 We may say then that Amnael as
prophet holds the hydreion of Isis, emblem of a cult “that should
be shrouded in a great silence”. However, he does thus oddly
merge with Aquarius, who in his Egyptian form had affinities
with Hapi, the god of Nilewater.

202 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

If we may judge by the stories, it was the correct thin g to go to
the temples of Egypt to be initiated by a vision into some higher
knowledge. Demokritos and Ostanes are described as coming
rom some foreign place. We have seen how often the stelai of
ultimate knowledge are located in a temple. That of Memphis
was especially venerated by the seekers of knowledge and Zosi-
mos describes the things he saw there. The mysterious John
Arch-priest of Tuthia in Euagia “and the sanctuaries there found”'
seems of Egyptian provenance—whatever place-names have
been corrupted in his description. An alchemic text states, “It is
necessary to know in what parts of the Land of the Thebaid is
prepared the mysterious powder: Kleopolis (Herakleopolis)
Alkoprios (Lykopolis), Aphrodite, Apolenos (Apollonopolis)
and Elephantine.” 20 There seems behind this list a memory of
places of metallurgical exploitation in Egypt. Afrikanos who
seems an historical character, Sextus Julius Africanus, stated
(cited by the Synkellos), “Souphis” of the 4 th dynasty of Memphis
ruled for 63 years. He reared the Great Pyramid, which Hero-
dotos says was built by Kheops. Souphis conceived a contempt
tor the gods perhaps Afrikanos was taking the Great Pyramid
as a sort of Tower of Babel. “He also composed the Sacred Book
which I acquired on my visit to Egypt because of its great renown ”
Eusebios says much the same of Souphis; but the Armenian
version of his Chronika, adds, “Souphis behaved arrogantly
towards the gods themselves; then in penitence he composed the
Sacred Book, in which the Egyptians believe that they possess a
great treasure.” 21 The place-name Hormanouthi, where Isis met
Amnael, has been taken as an error for Hormachythi (“at the place
of Horos of Edfu”) and this site as the seat of alchemy in Apollo-
nopolis. Orpheus in the Orphic Argonautika speaks of the under¬
world-) ourney and the necessary revelation at Memphis as the
same sort of thing:

I’ve told you other things I’ve meditated
and grasped when I went by Tainaron’s dark road
to Hades, trusting in my life, my love
for her my wife; and how I brought forth the holy
Egyptian Word, when I entered divine Memphis.

Zosimos writes, “At the eastern entry of Isis’ Temple you’ll
see characters dealing with the white substance [silver]; at the
western entry you’ll find the yellow mineral [gold] near the orifice

ISIS

203

(»r the Three Springs.” 22 We may add that the Gnostic writings
show much interest in the life led in and round the Egyptian
temples, those centres of economic activity as well as of religious
rites. 23 If Afrikanos the alchemist was also the historian of the
early 3rd century, we know that he did go to Egypt, presumably
from Emmaos in Palestine where he mostly lived; he visited
Alexandreia to meet the philosopher Heraklas. 24 St Jerome in his
/ Afe of Hilarion says, “He went to Memphis so that, after confes¬
sing his wound [of love] he might return to the girl, armed with
1 lie magical arts; and so, after a year, taught by the prophets
| Dates] of Aesculapius [Asklepios, Imhotep],” he left. 25

The Sungod, with ram-head, standing under a circular canopy made
hy the serpent Mahen, and sailing on the river of the underworld; his
crew consists of Isis, Sia, Heka (god of magic), Horos of Heken, Ka-
Maat, Nehes (lookout), and Hu with magical steering-pole (Book of

Gates)

But the most extraordinary, because most detailed, account of a
quest for revelation in Egypt is that of Thessalos. Though he was
seeking medical and botanical knowledge, we may cite it here
because it helps considerably to illuminate the psychological
experience which is so important for all these Hermetic quests
and discoveries, including alchemy. It is possible that he was, in
I ,,ct, Thessalos of Tralles in Lydia, who lived in the 1st century,
dying under Nero at Rome. In the time of Plinius his tomb was
still to be seen on the Via Appia with the arrogant title of Iatro-
nik.es, Healing-Victor. Son of a weaver, he had followed his
lather’s trade for a while; then, despite his slight education, he
took up medicine and soon acquired both a great name and a
large fortune. He was extremely vain and constantly asserted that

ISIS

205

204 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

medicine was the highest art and he the best physician. He be¬
longed to the school of the Methodikoi, but developed its doctrine
and practice so thoroughly that he has been taken as one of the
school’s founders. His way, in extreme cases, was to bring about a
thorough commotion or disturbance in the constitution of the
organism: synkrisis. For this purpose he used, internally and ex¬
ternally, strong vegetable remedies for three days, together with
a very strict regimen and the use of emetics at intervals. A period
of fasting following, and then a course of restoratives. His
reputation seems to have soon waned, though Galen often men¬
tioned him with scorn and ridicule . 26

This proud and opinionated character seems to fit fairly well
with the tone of the narrative of the revelation; and the emphasis
on vegetable remedies harmonises with a deep botanical in-
terest The identification is thus by no means impossible, though
the obsession with magical procedures is hard to reconcile with
the career of an acceptable if eccentric doctor at Rome. At least
we should expect Plinius to have some sinister tales to tell or
Juvenal to have written a blistering line or two on the doctor

from Lydia. However that may be, the narrative is a fascinating
document: &

To Caesar Augustus, Greeting! Many have tried during their life
Augustus Caesar, to deliver up the secrets of lots of marvellous things’
but none of them has been able to complete his project because of the
latal darkness that came to overwhelm his spirit; and I then seem to be
the only one of all those who have lived since the beginning of time to
have composed a marvellous treatise. Indeed, though I had undertaken
a task that goes beyond the limits of human powers, I have been able to
crown it with the end that it required—not, it is true, without many
trials and dangers. 27 7

After being trained in the science of grammar in Asia and becoming
more learned than the people of that country, I decided to turn my
nowledge to account for a while. So I set sail to that town where all
ocked, Alexandreia, Furnished with a good sum of money, I frequented
the most accomplished philologists, and everyone praised me for my
love of study and quickness in understanding.

I was also steadily assiduous in learning from the dialectical physi¬
cians; for I was consumed by an incredible passion for that science
Then, as the time had come for me to return home—for I was already,
far enough advanced in medicine—I began to scour the libraries in
quest of knowledge. There I came on a book by Nechepso, describing
24 ways of treating the whole body and every malady, according to each

Zodiacal sign, with stones and plants. I was confounded by the wonder¬
ful grandeur of the undertaking. But it held apparently nothing but the
vain phantom of a royal futility. For I prepared to no purpose the Heliac
I’ill recommended by the author together with other recipes. I failed in
all my attempts to treat illnesses.

This mistake I felt as something more cruel than death. I was eaten
up with chagrin. Indeed I had trusted so blindly in the book that I had
boasted about the virtue of these remedies to my parents, and had
told them I’d return home as soon as I had tried them out. Now I could
not remain at Alexandreia because of my colleagues mockeries, for it s
1 he way of fine exploits to arouse jealousy. Besides I wasn t eager to re¬
turn as I had been convinced of my incapacity to carry out my promises.

So I began to travel about Egypt, driven on by this goad that
wounded my soul, seeking some way of making my rash hope, or, if
I failed, resolved to abandon life by suicide. As my soul predicted to
me ceaselessly that I’d have communication with the gods, I went on
raising my hands to heaven, begging the gods to accord me, by a
dream-vision or by an inspiration from on high, some favour of which
I might be proud, returning, joyous, to Alexandreia and my homeland.

Thus I arrived at Diospolis [Thebes], the most ancient capital I mean
of Egypt, which possesses a host of temples; and there I established
•myself. In effect there lived there priests, friends of letters and learned
in many sciences. Time passed. My friendship with the priests went on
increasing all the while. One day I asked them if something of the
operative force of magic survived. I noticed that most of them were
shocked at my boldness in conceiving such hopes; but one, who in¬
spired confidence by the gravity of his manners and his great age, did
not disappoint my friendship. He assured me that he had the power
of producing visions by means of a basin filled with water.

I then invited him to stroll with me in the most deserted part of the
city without telling him what I wanted. We came to a woodland
environed with a profound peace, and there I suddenly threw myself
down on the ground, and, weeping, embraced his feet. And as he,
bewildered at this unexpected act, asked me why I had done it, I
declared that my life was in his hands, that it was absolutely necessary
for me to converse with a god, and that, if this desire was not satisfied, I
was ready to give up living. Raising me up from the earth, he quieted
me with the most amiable discourse, promised cordially to yield to my
prayer, and bade me fast for three days.

As for me, my soul was completely melted at the declaration of
these promise’s. I kissed his hand and heaped him with thanks, weeping
like a fountain. For it’s a law of nature that an unhoped-for joy provokes
more tears than grief. Then, emerging from the wood, we began to
fast; and those three days, in my impatient condition seemed to me
as many years.

206 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

When the third day was come, from the moment of dawn, I went to
greet the priest. He had prepared a suitable chamber with everything
needed for the consultation. On my side, always prepared, I had
A t° Ut lnf “ mln g the P«est, paper and ink for taHng notes
MCC ’ ° f an y thi ng said. The priest asked if I wanted to
talk with the ghost of a dead man or with a god

“With Asklepios,” I told him, adding that he would crown his
kindnesses if he let me converse with the god on my own. He agreed
without pleasure as I could tell clearly from his face, but at leal he
promised. Then he shut me in the chamber, bade me sit down opposite

e throne where the god would take his seat, and invoked Asklepios
thanks to the virtue of mysterious words. After that he hurried out’
locking the door with a key. ’

And there I was seated, annihilated in body and soul at the sight of
so wonderful a thing—for no human word could render the features of
that face or the splendours of the ornaments that set it off—when the
god, lifting his right hand, saluted me thus:

O blessed Thessalos, today a god honours you, and soon, when men
earn o your success, they will hold you in reverence as a god yourself
Ask me what you please, I will reply to you faithfully in all matters.”

1 could scarcely speak, so much was I carried out of myself and so
much fascinated by the god’s beauty. Still, I asked him why I had
failed in trying the recipes of Nechepso.

The god answered me, “King Nechepso, highly intelligent man as he
was, and possessing every magic power, had not however received
from any divine voice the secrets that you want to learn. Endowed with
a natural sagacity he had grasped the affinities \sympatheiai] of stones
and plants with the stars; but he did not know the moments or the
places were the plants must be gathered. The growth or the withering
of ah fruits of the season depend on the efflux [aporrhoia] of the stars.
Further the divine spirit [pneuma], which in its extreme subtlety passes
through every substance, is spread in particular abundance in the
spots which the astral influx successively reached in the course of the
cosmic revolution.” 28

The god then expounds a pneumatic explanation of the diversity
o virtues in plants according to the different climates in which
they grow; and ends with technical advice as to the ways of
gathering them, with a final prayer. Thessalos has promised to
hold the revelation secret: “to keep with care the discourse de¬
livered to you without transmitting it to anyone who is a stranger
to our art.” 5

We may note a few points in the story which help to authen¬
ticate a ist-century background, though they do not prove it.

ISIS

207

The priests are indignant at Thessalos’ question because magic is a
capital offence. The description of Thebes accords with that given
by Strabon:

I ; .vcn now traces of its magnitude are pointed out, extending as they do
for a distance of 80 stadia in length; and there are several temples, but
most of these too were mutilated by Kambyses, and now it is a collec-
l ion of villages, part of it in Arabia (the eastern side of the Nile) where
was the city, and a part on the far side of the river, where was the
Memnonion. 29

What perhaps most strongly suggests a fairly early date is the
directness and coherence of the narrative, despite supernatural
aspects. Divinations have been classified under three headings:
(a) theurgic, in a sort of ecstatic state, when the gods makes his
immistakeable advent: the person concerned may feel himself
awake or dreaming; (b) magical, where the god or the divine
force makes an indirect advent or impact, through material
(>bjccts (lamp flame or basin of water) or through a medium whom
lie possesses; (c) goetic, where the force animates an object by
imprinting on it certain movements or modifies certain of its
proportions . 30 Thessalos’ experience was of the first type; and it
lias been asked whether he was in an hallucinatory state as a
result of fasting, excitement, strain, or whether the initiator had
hypnotised him and suggested the vision to his already heightened
sensibilities. We cannot tell. Certainly, as we know from the
evidence of what primitive folk have been capable of imagining
and feeling as reality during initiation-ordeals accompanied by
fastings, men like Thessalos were able in these centuries to con¬
vince themselves of strange things. What is hard to harmonise is
die direct experience of the advent, which we can pass off as the
result of a dream-hallucinatory state controlled by an intense
hope of contacting the sources of truth and certainty, and the
aftermath of detailed recipes and so on. Unless we are to take the
whole thing as a fabrication—and that is a very unlikely hypo¬
thesis—we must assume that the priest-initiator, after playing his
part in directing the liberated fantasies of Thessalos, provides the
recipes and assures his disciple that they have been left by the
god. Thessalos, in a mixture of good faith and desire to tell as
convincing a tale as possible, then makes the transition from
vision to recipes much less abrupt or unclear than it actually

was.

208 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

There certainly were magicians who faked their effects.
Hippolytos informs us of the magician who “after making
obscurity in the chamber”—^, the same word as that used
by Thesallos for the place of advent —“boasts of bringing
about his presentation with the aid of gods or demons, and if
anyone happens to ask to be shown Asklepios, invokes him
by this prayer. We are then given eleven hexameters of invoca¬
tion or epiklesis. “When he has finished with this pleasantry, an
Asklepios of fire appears on the wall at the back.” Then we’are
told of a performance of lekanomancy, basin-divination, and
recipe for falsifying seals. At last Hippolytos comes back to the
explanation of the fire-revealed god. The magician, “after draw¬
ing on the wall the silhouette he wants, coats its surface secretly
with a pharmakon composed of the following mixture: Lakonian
Purple and Bitumen of Zante. Then, as if in an ecstatic delirium,
he moves near the wall a flaming torch and the drug takes fire,
throwing out a great light.” 31 As the bitumen could be dangerous,
phosphorescent substances were commonly used. Elsewhere we
are told: “If you want to draw on the wall any living thing
( \oidion ) you like, even with night coming on, whoever sees it in
the dark will run off, thinking it demons or gods.” 32

But we must remember that Hippolytos is a Christian anxious
to debunk such phenomena. Fallings certainly existed, but also
experiences such as that of Thessalos, which, however induced,
were subjectively honest and sincere.

Two prayers or incantations to be uttered at herb-gathering
may be given here to bring out how close were the principles in
such procedures to alchemic doctrine. The first develops the
notion of Sympathy into that of the Union of Opposites. It was
to be said before the rising of the sun:

Lord, Master of the Universe, Author of all Creation, invisible and
visible, you who of this Visible Creation have made certain parts
naturally allied and harmonious one with another so that they own the
same power in their beings that are born by means of it, and who have
made other parts in return not sympathetic, not harmonious, except
that, in this state, from their fusion together and from their union, there
results a well-tempered mixture, and these things are the heralds
proclaiming from afar your Majesty: you then at this moment still
when I gather the plant here NN which you have made smypathise
with the planet NN, consent that it may be strong and filled with your
might and fully efficacious for use in medicines which are drawn from

ISIS

209

ii against the maladies that afflict your creature, with the aid of this
aaine beginning that obeys your command, for your name is blessed
and glorified ages in ages Amen. 33

The same prayer is to be said in preparing the medicine and in
using it.

The second prayer shows the magician making himself into
I iermes by the ritual act. It is remarkable also for the lavish way
m which it personifies the flower or herb as deity after deity, thus
both glorifying and magnifying the virtues inherent in it, and
placating it, winning it over so that it will not resent the act of
gathering, but will allow all the magnified virtues to be taken
over:

You have been sown by Kronos, conceived in the womb of Hera,
kept from all evil by Ammon, brought forth by Isis, nourished by Zeus
of Rain, raised to maturity by Helios and Dew.

You are the Dew of all the Gods, you are the Heart of Hermes, you
urc the Seed of the Ancestral Gods, you are the Eye of Helios, you are
1 lie Light of the Moon, you are the ashes of Osiris, you are the Beauty
mid the Splendour of the Heaven, you are the Soul of the Daimon of
( )si ris which goes dancing in every place, you are the Vital Breath of
Ammon.

As you have lifted up Osiris, so lift up yourself. Rise up as Helios
rises every day. Your Height is equal to that of Helios at the zenith,
your Roots are as deep as the Roots of the Abyss, your Powers are in
die Heart of Hermes, your Stalk and your Branches are the Bones of
M nevis, your Flowers are the Eye of Horos, your Seed is the Seed of
Pan [Min].

I wash you of this Bitch as I wash the Gods. Be you then also
purified by my prayer for your Salvation and give us your Force like
Ares and Athena. I am Hermes. I gather you with Good Fortune, with
I he Good Spirit, at the right hour of the day, on the day when every¬
thing must succeed. 34

Note the mixture of Greek and Egyptian deities. Another magical
text has, “I am Isis who is called Dew.” The Daimon of Osiris is
the ICa (which we may call roughly the Double in Egyptian reli-
gi ( >us psychology). The little plant is swollen in the ritual moment
into a cosmic tree, linking the Above and the Below.

In all primitive religion there is a sense in which the earth
i 1 self and the spirit-world are one, though the unity is only
realised normally at a ritual moment. The relation is thus a
dynamic one, continuous and yet only sporadically grasped.

210 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

With the growth of civilisation the unity tends to break up and
the secular world from which the impact of spirit or god has been
eliminated extends its range. Apart from ritual moments, it is at
moments of fear and uncertainty, when the unknown is felt to be
invading the individual or collective existence, that the sense of a
pervasive spirit-world reasserts itself. In ritual-myth and in
meditations about the gods, efforts are made, consciously or un¬
consciously, to define the relations of the two worlds and to set
up certain boundaries. A culture like that of the Mesopotamians
with its steady concern for the world of the stars, is in a position
to work out elaborate systems in which the other world (largely
seen now as a sky-world) is both separated from the earth and
then reconnected with it, both in general schemes and in particular
networks. Hence it seems that this culture, or set of cultures, first
at all fully elaborated schemes of heaven-earth correspondences
A text of the Kassite era (the second half of the and millennium
b.c.), together with the fragment of an Assyrian tablet and a
tablet of the Seleukid epoch, serves to show how far back such
schemes went and how strong was their persistence.

Here is a summary of the third tablet:

Gypsum is the god Ninurtu [wargod]. The pear is the demon asakku.
The meal mash is Lugalgirra and Meslamtae [lesser gods of Nergal’s
cycle, underworld gods]. Three meal-cakes are the gods Anu [heaven],
Enlil [earth] Ea [waters], A great bull’s skin is also the god Anu The
copper drum is Enlil. Seven big reed-poles are the seven great gods of
Ishara [an aspect of Ishtar, a goddess of fertility]. The scapegoat is
Ninamashazagga, spirit of herds.

The censer is Kusud “the great libation-pourer” [or a grain goddess:
it appears under both male and female aspects]. The torch is Nusku god
of fire in the pantheon of the town of Nippur, but also Gibil god of
fire in the pantheon of the town of Eridu.

Then comes the assimilation of metals to certain gods, though the
text is defective, and then the various parts of the body with their
correspondences. Now let us look at the tablet of the Kassite
epoch:

The vase agubbu is Ninhaburkuddu, queen of incantations. .. . The
tamarisk is Anu. The palmtree-head is Tammuz. The plant mashtakal
(? sage) is Ea, the reed salalu is Ninurta. The plant */[? craetegus] is the
goddess Nina. The wood bur is the god Girra. Silver is the Great God
[moon]. Gold is Enmesharra [sun]. Copper is Ea. Lead is Ninmah
[here a great mother-goddess] . . .

ISIS

211

The cypress is Adad. Variegated wool is Lamashtu, daughter of
Anu. The aromatic Zu is Ninurta. The censer is the god Urash. The
torch is the god Gibil. The pure incense is the god Negun [son of
Ninlil, consort of Enlil]. The amphora [?] is Igi-balag, gardener of
Ncrgal. The skin of a great bull is Ninda-Gud [priest of Enlil], Gypsum
is the stormgod [Ninurta], Bitumen is the rivergod. The scapegoat is
kushu [demon of plague, son of Anu], The Living Lamb is Girra [god
of herds, not Girra of plague]. The goatbitch of sacrifice by burning is
M uhru.

The barley grains, the dining-table, the pots gag% are Ninurra-Ea
| here gods of potters]. The weapon with seven laurel-wood heads is the
storm, the weapon is Marduk. The goat of Ungal [patron god] of Nip¬
pur. The crane is the god Ninsig [Ea of metallurgists]. The ... of
cedar is the weapon of Zu [the birdgod who stole the tablets of fate] . . .

The white wine and its vessel are the eyes of the consultant [?]. The
white fig is his chest. The nur fig is his knees. The fig is his loins. The
sweet wine is his lower-stomach. The god Kushu [is] in the ceiling of
l lie room. The god Muhru before the city-gate. The god Sakkut in
midst of the ponds. The god Silakku in the ruins. The god Equrum in
I lie leg-muscles. The god Abbagula in the wall.. . 35

The text ends with the formula: “Let the initiated explain it to
the initiated; he who has not been initiated must not read it.”
And we are told it is a copy of an ancient tablet owned by the
temple Eshumera at Nippur. We see that everything on earth has
its divine exemplar; the two aspects, the divine and the earthly,
are both fused together and separate, the earthly reflecting or
expressing the divine. Under the extreme intellectualising pressure
at work in Greek philosophic circles, the divine was cut away and
became the transcendent Ideas of Plato. With the Stoics a more
organic sense reasserted itself; and among the alchemists the
divine aspect (that of energy, of formative and transformative
process with its dynamic element of extending significant struc¬
ture) became fully fused afresh in theory with the material aspect.
That is, in alchemy we find the earlier correspondence-schemes
lifted on to a new level, still holding many fantasy-elements, but
tending towards scientific systems of inter-relationship.

Ancient and Contemporary Crafts

Before we turn to the historical figures of alchemy, we should
glance briefly at the various craft-traditions which underlay the
ideas and methods of the art. From the very first, metallurgy
must have involved various magics and ritual-practices with their
expression in myth. The extraction of metal from ore was itself
a form of transmutation, which must have produced a great awe
and sense of wonder translated into rituals meant to safeguard,
analyse and help the processes. The same situation appeared
in other crafts connected with fire as a transforming agent: cook¬
ing which changed flesh or plant in various ways, and pottery¬
making which changed a soft, pervious substance into a hard,
impervious one, giving earth something of the character of a
stone. In all these processes the qualities of the materials were
changed. Such important craft-systems, considered to involve
dangerous potencies and crucial moments of change, were hedged
round with ritual secrecies, oaths, mysteries of all kinds. The
operators formed a fraternity fiercely guarding its lore. There was
clearly a period when the smith was a sort of semi-divine shaman
owning hidden forms of contact with the spirit-world. We can¬
not here explore this field, but may point to the abundant evidence
in Africa and Asia for this phase; to the identification of the smith
with the shaman-heroes of the Finnish Kalevala . 1

There would appear to have existed at several different cultural levels
(which is a mark of very great antiquity), a close connection between
the art of the smith, the occult sciences (shamanism, magic, healing
etc.) and the art of song, dance, and poetry. These overlapping
techniques, moreover, appear to have been handed down in an aura of
sacred mystery comprising inititations, specific rituals and “trade
secrets.” . . . One element is constant—that is the sacredness of metal
and consequently the ambivalent, eccentric and mysterious character of
all mining and metallurgical operations. Certain mythological themes of

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS

213

11 ic earlier stone ages were integrated in the mythology of the age of
metals. What is especially significant is the fact that symbolism of the
“thunderstone”, in which projectiles and stone missiles are compared
with the thunderbolt, underwent a great development in the mytholo¬
gies of metallurgy. The weapons which the smith-gods or divine-smiths
forge for the celestial gods are thunder and lightning. (Eliade). 2

We cannot follow up these points; but we must remember
that the craft-lores of miners and metallurgists had existed for
millennia and had developed rich traditions. Sumerian terms,
carried on by the later Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians,
can often be identified; and we meet many minerals as well as
terms for processes, such as cooking, leaching, washing, roasting,
which play an important part in due time in alchemy. 3 Texts show,
however, that there was a kind of secret language, using effects of
similar sounds. Thus, a recipe for making glass dating back to the
17th century b.c. uses eru, eagle, for erii, copper. A-ba-an (stone)
is written ha-bar-an, the signs ha and bar having also the values of
a and ba. Crude sulphur is called the bank-of-the-river. We also
meet craft-jargon, abbreviations and Sumerian values imposed on
Akkadian terms in technical works as well as in those of astro¬
nomers and physicians. Cryptograms occur in medical texts:
lion-fat, human-fat for opium and blood-of-a-black-snake for
castor-oil are common. “Let him that knows show him that
knows; but he that knows shall not show him that does not
know,” says a 7th-century work. On tablets concerned with
glass-making in the Kassite period of the 2nd millennium there
are prohibitions against making the lore known. There is also an
insistence on correct and exact copying that springs from a belief
in the magical efficacy of the text as it has been used. 4

Artificial alloys were also known. Inlays and metalwork show
the use of both natural and synthetic alloys; the delight in rich
colours led to various combinations and experiments. Sardeis,
the city of the Lydian empire ruled by Kroisos, which played an
important part in the creation of coinage proper, has revealed a
6th-century workshop near the torrent of the Paktolos, which
ancient writings reported to be rich in gold-bearing sands.
Fragments of gold, parts of crucibles, blow-pipe nozzles and other
apparatus were found; in the area were more than 300 small clay
basins in which gold was refined from ore by blowing intense
flame through pipes, and furnaces in which silver had been
8

214 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS

215

separated from gold. Some of the gold appeared to contain bits
of silver and it has been conjectured that the kin g may have
deliberately debased one of the earliest currencies. 6

The Babylonians knew an excellent test for gold—cupellation.
A mixture of metals, including gold and silver, is heated strongly
for a while in air, plus some lead, in a cupel, a porous vessel made
of bone-ash. The lead and copper, oxidised, pass through the
cupel, while the gold-silver remains as a metallic button. The silver
can then be removed by heating again in a cupel with some sulphur
compounds, which convert the silver into its sulphide and allow
it in turn to pass through the cupel. Thus only the gold is left.
This quite sophisticated process was invented in north-east
Asia Minor in the first half of the third millennium b.c. 6 The
fining-pot of the refiner’s-fire are often mentioned in the Bible. 7

In the 14th century b.c. the pharaoh Akhenaten was in corres¬
pondence with Burrahuriash II, king of Babylon. A letter from
the latter complained, “The 20 mnas of gold were not complete.
When it was put in the furnace, it did not come forth 5 mnas”*
The metallurgists of these days would not easily be deceived by
faked or adulterated metals; but at the same time their power of
manipulating metals, e.g. converting silver into its sulphides, must
have stimulated ideas of yet further conversions. Egypt was the
most abundant source of gold in the ancient world, and we should
have expected its smiths to acquire what technological s kill s
were available, for dealing with it. 9 They were able to make
extensive use of gold in colouring decorative work; the hues
range from bright yellow, grey, various shades of red, reddish-
brown, brick-colour, to dull purple-plum and an odd rose-pink. 10
Much was no doubt due to chance and the natural mixtures of
silver, copper, and iron in varying quantities, but in some cases
the stain was caused by organic matter. The rose-pink was a
heat-resisting coat of oxide of iron, produced by dipping the
object in an iron solution and heating it. 11 This process was used
many centuries before the oldest written recipes for tinting
vessels. Old Akkadian texts describe ways of staining mineral, and
stones by cooking them in solutions or embedding them in chemi¬
cals to produce faked gems. The importance of colour is brought
out by the syllabaries. The sixteen Akkadian terms for gold include
nine referring to colour or shade. The colours were valued for
their beauty but they also had their magical virtues.

The Assyrian library of Assurbanipal has left many tablets

dealing with glass. In all glass-making the essentials are silica,
an alkali, and lime (or less often lead oxide); a decolorising agent
like manganese is generally added. Analysis of window-glass
from Pompeii shows silica 69, soda 17, lime 7, alumina 3, iron
oxide 1, manganese and copper traces. Many colouring agents have
been found in ancient glass. Assyrian blue glass used copper,
red glass used cuprous oxide. Assyrian white glass has tin oxide,
lead antimonate has been found in yellow. One recipe seems to
have in rudimentary form the Purple-of-Cassius, the aim being
apparently a pink or red coral. The ingredients are 7,200 parts of
ordinary glass, 52 of oxide of tin, 20 of antimony, an unreadable
portion of salt or saltpetre, and 1 part of gold. The proportion
here of gold (-014%) is the usual order of magnitude in the pre¬
paration of ruby glass. A Mesopotamian text going back to the
17th century b.c., to the reign of Gulkizar, gives us several recipes
of metallurgical chemistry:

To a mina of %uku glass add 10 shekels of lead, 15 of copper, | shekel of
saltpetre, \ of lime. Put it on to smelt and you’ll obtain Copper of
1 ,ead.

To a mina of %uku glass add 10 shekels of lead, 14 of copper, 2 of
lime, 1 of saltpetre. Put it on to smelt and you’ll obtain Copper of
Lead. 12

These recipes are not alchemic, but they show already a sophisti¬
cated sense of fusing and modifying metals.

We noted that we should expect Egyptian smiths to be in the
forefront of gold-techniques. However gold does not seem to
have been refined or purified till the Persian period (525-332
b.c.) when the method presumably came in through Persian and
Syrian influences—and with it much of the myth and ritual con¬
nected with the techniques. 13 Agatharkides described in the later
Ptolemaic period the way of refining gold with lead, salt, dn and
barley-bran; no provision seems made for recovering the silver,
which would have been lost. Debasement of gold, however, is
found far back, near the end of the 18th dynasty; rings have up
to 75 % of copper. 14 Cobalt was used in glass colouring from the
18th dynasty; as in Egypt it occurs only as traces in other
minerals, the glass-makers must have been in contact with the
industries abroad, in Persia and the Caucasus. The early use of
cobalt is of interest in general, since the ore is not blue and does
not suggest its colour-possibilities. 15 The Egyptians early learned

216 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

how to glaze; a piece of glazed steatite comes from the Badaean
epoch, glazed powdered quartz faience and then glazed solid
quartz from predynastic times, then glazed pottery on till the
Arab period. 16 In faience a vitreous alkaline paste is used; the
colours were mostly blue, green, or greenish-blue, but at times
we meet violet, white, yellow, or two or more colours; an extra
layer was also used to enhance or modify the effects. The period
when lead glazes came in is uncertain and much debated. 17

The magical effects of colours were often deduced on the
principle of sympathies. Galactitite (evidently white) was thought
to promote the flow of milk in women; amethyst seems to have
been considered a defence against drunkenness on account of
its wine-like hues. 18 An old Sumerian hymn compares the change
from light to darkness with that of gypsum into bitumen; and
words like “night” and “day”, salmu and pisii , are often used for
black and white. 19 By neo-Babylonian or Chaldean times the
correlation of stars or gods with metal has developed. Silver
becomes the metal of Marduk, gold that of En.Me.Shar.Ra,
copper that of Ea; a tablet allots silver, gold, copper, tin, to Anu,
Enlil, Ea, Nin-a-mal; other tablets connect gods, metals, plants,
stars. 20

In Egypt, Ptah of Memphis was “master of gold-smelters and
goldsmith”, his temple was the Goldsmithy, his priests had titles
like Great Wielder of the Hammer, or He who Knows the Secret
of the Goldsmiths. The tradition of Memphis as a gold-centre
was remembered by the alchemists; Zosimos said, “I have

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS Z 1 J

examined in detail a furnace in the ancient temple of Memphis.”
Ptah was a creator-god, and his cosmic role had been formulated
already by his priests in the Old Kingdom. 21 Echoes of their
thought can be found in texts of all periods; but what seems the
original statement was copied under Shabako (about 700 b.c.).
It accepts the gods of Heliopolis and Hermopolis but subordinates
them to Ptah, of whom they are seen as forms. First comes Ptah
who is upon the great (primeval) place; then Ptah as the Waters;
then Ptah-Naunet, the female counterpart of the spirit of the
abyss; then Ptah “the very great [ancient] one who is the heart
and tongue of the divine company.” As creator, he represents the
seat of intelligence (heart) and the organ of spech that translates
thought into command (action). In all he takes eight forms, of
which the last is the lotus. “The supreme god is Ptah, who has
endowed all the gods and their Ka’s through that heart [of his]
which appeared in the form of Horos and that tongue [of his]
which appeared in the form of Thoth, both of which were forms
of Ptah.” 22 We thus see him in a hierarchical series of manifesta¬
tions or transformations while remaining a single person. If the
priests or craftsmen applied this conception of him to the metal¬
lurgical processes over which he presided (and in which in a
sense he would be incarnated), they were approaching a proto-
alchemic position.

There is much more we might profitably consider in early metal¬
lurgy, but the above points are sufficient for our purposes. If we
turn to the alchemists we find that they seem to have used four
main methods in goldmaking: they produced yellow alloys of
base metals like brass; they prepared debased gold; they super¬
ficially coloured metals or alloys; they tried a set of complicated
processes in which distilled liquids were used or in which metals
were subjected to the action of vapours. The last method was the
important one.

The brass-like alloys (including some of the alloys of copper, tin,
zinc), which have been made in modern times under names like
ormolu or mannheim-gold, were known to the alchemists. They
prepared them by smelting mixtures of copper, tin, etc., with
kadmia (a mixture of metallic oxides with a variable proportion
of zinc, found in the flues of the furnaces). This impure and un¬
certain material cannot have yielded regular results, which may
be the reason for the differing recipes for its use. As for the brass

25. Bartering a necklet for perfume

219

218 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

alloys, the alchemists seem to have prepared a number of them
with copper as the main ingredient, plus tin, lead, zinc, iron, silver,
mercury, or some of these. Doublings of gold, so-called, probably
often involved copper and silver. Silver gives gold a greenish,
copper a reddish tinge; the admixture of both copper and silver
hardly altered the hue. The alchemist would interpret the effect
as showing that gold as a seed acted on the silver and copper,
growing at their expense, till the whole amount became gold.

Superficial colouring was probably understood for what it was,
at least to some extent; it is called tinging, not making, of gold.
Then as now three main methods were used. The metal was
coated with a tinted lacquer of gums; solutions were laid on to
form a thin layer of sulphides; the base metal in debased gold was
removed from the surface by corrosive substances so that a layer
of fairly pure gold was left showing. (The corrosive would be
something like sulphur trioxide got by calcining sulphates of iron
and copper.) But the typical alchemic process involved volatile
substances, spirits, and was done by means of distillations and
sublimations. All pictures of apparatus or workshops show
instruments for dealing with volatile substances. Only such ap¬
paratus could be imagined as extracting the spirit from a body or
re-infusing it. 23

We may now pause to glance at the random indications we get in
the papyri of the trades which played their part in bringing al¬
chemy about. First, the metallurgical. The mining of metals and
semi-precious or precious stones remained a government mono¬
poly in Egypt under the Romans. 24 The government also con¬
trolled the quarrying of granite, porphyry, marble and the like.
Working conditions seem to have been miserable; and more than
elsewhere in the empire compulsion was used to get labour. 25

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS

Criminals were also sent to the mines. We know little, however,
of the minerals mined. Copper, gold, iron, lead, and manganese
ores are still found in the eastern desert and in the Sinai peninsula,
but how far they were worked by the Romans is uncertain. Some
gold still came down the Nile from Aithiopia. Antimony, cobalt,
and tin were imported. Philostratos gives us a picture of the
barter-system on the borders of Egypt and Aithiopia: “When he
[Apollonios] arrived at the frontier—at a place named Sykaminos

he came across a quantity of uncoined gold, an elephant, and
various roots, myrrh, and spices, all lying there without anyone
to guard them at the crossroads.” Apollonios contrasted the
honest ways of the folk there with the commercial greeds of the
Greeks:

Contrast our good Hellenes. They pretend they can’t live unless one
penny begets another, and unless they can drive up the price of their
wares by chaffering or by creating a scarcity. One pretends he’s got a
daughter due for marriage, another that his son is just reaching man¬
hood, a third has to pay his subscription to his club, a fourth is having
a house built, a fifth would be ashamed to be thought a worse man of
business than his father before him. What a splendid thing if wealth were
less honoured and equality flourished a bit more, and “if the black iron
were left to rust in the ground.” Then all men would be in accord and
the whole earth like one brotherhood. 26

We gain a few glimpses of the premises of goldsmiths in con¬
tracts. Thus, in 18 b.c. at Alexandreia Apollonios, son of Sarapion,
made a contract to cede his goldsmith’s shop to Euangelos, son
of Archoneus, on “receiving the balance of 300 silver drachmai
on or before 9 Phamenoth”. The premises include “the shop, the
tallies built for the trade and . . . belonging to him in the inner
circle of the square portico on the street(?) leading westward.
The neighbours on the south being Eirenaios, on the north
Apollophanes, on the east Sosibios, and facing the street on the
west.” There were several strict terms:

The costs of the cession are borne by Euangelos himself. In addition it
is agreed that Apollonios shall give undisturbed possession, inviolate
and free from rental charges up to the present month Mecheir of
Caesar’s 12th Year. And Apollonios shall at his expense withstand
anyone, who may proceed against him or lay claim to the property for
private debts, nor shall he himself take possession nor use the law and
custom about any such transactions. But if he violates any of these
provisions, apart from the agreement being valid, he shall pay what he

26. Egyptian unguent-maker’s workshop

220 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

has received on the principal with a penalty of 50% immediately and
besides 500 dr. in silver as a private debt, and damages and costs as
well as the prescribed penalty.

Euangelos shall have the right of exaction from Apollonios himself
and from all his property as if legal judgment had been pronounced.
And if Apollonios makes any evasion in the matter of cession, it shall
be possible for Euangelos, on depositing the balance of 300 silver dr.
at an authorised bank in the name of Apollonios, the risk of the bank
falling on Apollonios, and on transferring a copy of this agreement to
the Record Office of the Porch, to effect a cession from the name of
Apollonios and those associated with him to his own name or to whom¬
soever he chooses without personal recognition and without requiring
the presence of Apollonios himself, the cost of the transfer falling upon
the latter.

But if in his turn Apollonios is ready to make the cession in accordance
with the agreement and Euangelos does not pay the balance of 300
silver dr. in the prescribed time, he shall pay them with a penalty of 50%
increase and for over time he shall pay interest at the rate of 2 dr. per
mna a month. We request that this agreement be recorded. Registered
in Caesar’s 12th Year, 8 Mecheir. 27

A similar cession dated 128 from the village of Euhemereia is much
shorter:

From . . ., registered in the ward of Horion Hierax, and from Gaius
Longinus Priscus, honourably discharged from the Army as he claims ,
we wish you to cede to us for a further term of 4 years from the month
Sebastos of the present 13 th Year of Our Lord Hadrianus Caesar the
Goldsmith’s Industry at the Village of Euhemereia at a yearly inclusive
rental of 264 dr. in silver, which we shall pay in equal instalments on the
10th, 20th, and 30th of each month, all other charges to the treasury
being borne by . . . 28

We are given a rough view of the accumulation of trades in a
town of the early Byzantine period in a document probably
dealing with Panopolis, which Strabon had called “an old settle¬
ment of linen-workers and stone-workers”. In this, the town of
Zosimos, the poet Nonnos, and several other interesting writers,
we meet weaver, oilmaker, fuller, potter, miller, scent-maker,
carpenter, perhaps machine-constructor (for irrigation-works),
linen-weaver, weaver of rush-ropes or mats, smith of bronze
(< chalkotjpos ), and four goldsmiths as well as a workshop, ergasterion,
without qualification. There seems a tendency for the workers of
the same trade to gather in the same district. There were also

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 221

sellers of bread and wine, bath-attendant, sailor, shepherd, school¬
master, lawyer, doctor, banker, not to mention trumpet-player,
priests and magistrates. Interestingly there was a temple dedicated
to Agathodaimon, though whether he was merely a town-guardian
or had any special link with smiths we do not know. 29

Occasionally goldsmiths come up in letters or legal documents,
in a.d. 178 six persons, superintendents of the golden statue of
Athene-Theoris, were involved in a case of peculation. They
appealed to a prefect who had recently decided the case. A statue
of the goddess had been made and someone embezzled a quantity
of gold in the process. A previous prefect had given the verdict
that the loss, 18 talents of silver, should be met by the craftsmen
and the municipal officers of the year. The new prefect substan¬
tially upheld this verdict, distributing the responsibility between
the contractor, the inspector, the officials who paid out the money,
and the overseers, who now apply for relief. They do not deny
responsibility, but ask that two gymnasiarchs and a third official
whom (they allege) had been concerned in the disbursements,
should be ordered to aid them; they also ask for an extension of
time, offering a yearly payment of two talents and claiming that
the existing order would bring them to ruin. The craftsmen are
described as techneitai chrysochooi . 30

In a petition dated 5 September 296 two women, Thaesion and
Kyrillous, daughters of Kopres of the village of Karanis, were
acting through their maternal uncle Ammonios. Their father had
died (probably in 283-4) and they assert that before his death
their stepmother admitted that her husband owed her nothing,
yet later persuaded her father to remove seven sheep from the
(lock he left. As reason for the act, she insisted that her dead
husband had owed her a mna in gold; but she failed to prove her
case. So she brought up a contract supposed to have been made by
Kopres which assigned her a half-interest in a slave-girl as
security for her dowry. The daughters in reply stated that by law
all dowries recorded in writing must be evalued by a goldsmith
(for jewellery and metal objects) and a tailor (for clothes), and they
denied that the contract of dowry or that of security upheld the
stepmother’s demands. 31

We get some idea of what a goldsmith’s workshop was like
from one of the panels of the Black Room in the House of the
Vettii at Pompeii. A big furnace stands on the right; behind it a
workman (represented by a Cupid) is busy chiselling a metal

222 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

bowl, probably one of bronze, which is being prepared for silver-
inlays such a bowl was found in the shop of a trader in bronze-
work, negotiator aerarius. A second Cupid-worker keeps the furnace
blazing with a blowpipe and heats a piece of metal held in tongs.
A third hammers a small bit of metal on an anvil. Near him is a
counter with three open drawers and two pairs of scales, one large,
one smaller. A lady-customer discusses with the goldsmith the
weight of a jewel and beyond them two more workers hammer
a big piece of metal on an anvil.

Goldsmiths were used by hard-up persons for the sale ofvaluable
objects. A letter, probably of the 2nd century a.d., shows a man
in trouble, writing to some one (perhaps his wife) about the dis¬
position of articles:

I paid you 32 dr. by weight for the .. . of the embroiderer. I wrote to
you by letter telling you to get 80 dr. from Krissa who’s staying with
. . . on the mirror s account. I wrote that Epiktetos has my big silver
ring, making a . . . weighing a stater of Ptolemaic silver, so that my
might sell it. I sent you a message that Kornelis [Kornelios] the Gold¬
smith has my silver ring-key [or finger-key] off (? of a dr.) weight, to
be sold. You have 2 bronze strainers, one new, one in medium con¬
dition, and a new cup [or pint-measure] and you have my white cloak
and the white cloak of woollen felt and the self-coloured [undyed]
trimmings and those made of Xoitic wool and the near-white ones,
apart from the ..., but the big walking stick which is under the ... I

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 223

didn’t write all this in the tablet, as I was going out, being unable
to . . . 32

A 2nd-century letter expresses delight at the recovery of a friend
from illness. A goldsmith named Serenos has arrived and brought
(lie news that “he is now free from fever. This is the good news we
wished for.” 33 A 5 th-century letter shows a goldsmith occupied
with various matters that have no connection with his craft:

To my truly beloved brother Aphyngios, from Ptolemaios of Takona.
Since your Charity has pleased God, it’s our Duty to laud your
I lonoured State, brother. Deign, if it be your Pleasure, to meet. . . the
camel-driver until you speedily receive the articles sent to me by
Isak: 2 pairs of loaves, 1 vessel of radish-oil holding 2 sextarii, 1
double jar of good vinegar, and 1 flagon of wine, 1 . . ., 1 . . . , 3
cheeses and | a.. ., and x pair of [?] bellows, and . . . whatever the
camel-driver gets from the said man, give me a complete account,
what this is, so that the camel-driver may take it. I greet my Honoured
Mother Kyra and all my friends. I could not. . . dispatch him, but
with God’s help I shall soon send you a present [?]. I pray for your
health.

To my truly Beloved Brother Aphyngios Goldsmith from Ptolemaios
of Takona. 34

Naturally goldsmiths figure in many accounts. From the Ptolemaic
period we may take an expense-account, perhaps made up on a
journey, in which is recorded, as well as four copper drachmai
ollered to the sacred ibis, something “from Horos gold [smith]
l hrough Agathon”. In a papyrus that seems to give a statement of
banker’s daily business goldsmiths appear, Semthis and Opos
(several times) as well as “the goldsmiths of the town”. An account
(>f 21-20 b.c. of expenditure in copper has “to the priest of Thoeris,
to Kephalas goldsmith”, and so on. Payments in the early 4th
century include as recipients a high priest, linen-dealer, women
bakers, a goldsmith, stoker, dyer and bankers. 36

A goldsmith who played a minor part in history was Aetios
of Antioch in Koile Syria, who founded the Anomoian form of
Arianism. Left fatherless and penniless as a child, he became the
slave of a vine-dresser’s wife, then a wandering tinker or gold¬
smith. A scandal, or impulse of ambition led him to turn to
medicine under a quack (some herbalist or the like?); and he set
himself up at Antioch. The schools of medicine, having a materi¬
alist outlook, favoured the Arian heresy with its more rational
theology—the Son seen as not mystically identical in substance

224 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

with the Father and Aetios took up the Arian position with
extreme fervour. He frequented the meetings of the physicians
where theory was fiercely argued out, and became such a keen and
expert debater that he was paid by less eloquent thinkers to set
out their principles. After his mother’s death he studied under an
Arian bishop, but was driven out of Antioch to Anazarbos, where,
about a.d. 331, he resumed his work as a goldsmith. A professor
of grammar employed him as a servant, but dismissed him for
publicly arguing for views that he, the professor, opposed. Again
an Arian bishop took him up and he returned to Antioch, but
was again driven out. This time (before a.d. 348) he went to
Kilikia, where he debated with the Boborian Gnostics. Via
Antioch he travelled now to Alexandreia, where he debated with
the Manichee Aphthonios. Once again he took up medicine,
giving his services free to the sick and earning his livelihood by
goldsmith-work at night. His opponents, however, declared that
his main occupation at the time was an irreverent application of
logical figures and geometrical diagrams to the nature of God’s
Word. On a former master of his becoming bishop at Antioch,
he went back there, but his enemies forced him out of his ordina¬
tion as deacon (in which he was accepted only for teaching work).

The remainder of his career was on the same stormy and restless
pattern. With the rise of Arianism he defended the sharpest and
most explicit form of the heresy, at one time becoming bishop at
Constantinople. During a period of exile at Amblada, in Pisidia,

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 225

lie composed what the orthodox described as 300 Blasphemies;
and we know that he called his opponents Chronites (Temporals)
with an apparent allusion to their courtly obsequiousness. Unfor¬
tunately we do not own any complete work of his and are
dependent on the abuse of the orthodox for the account of his
life and ideas. They attacked his morals; but his wickedness seems
to have consisted in following various Gnostics in denying the
need of fasting and self-mortification. While we cannot prove that
his heretical positions were linked with his training as goldsmith
and physician, the connection is likely and suggestive. 36

Bronzesmiths were scattered often in small localities. A docu¬
ment of the late 3rd or early 4th century, drawn up by some official
apparently with a view to exacting contributions from each of
them, mentions Pasion bronzesmith, and then “in the village Teis
workshop of Ammonios with his sons and bronzesmith Euan-
gelos”. In the Byzantine period we find them on the big estates.

I .ate 6th-century documents, probably of the Apion family, name
loannes and Petros as chalkeis, and

To Phib, smith, when working on the 6 irregatos outside the gate,
on account of pay, 10 art. of com by kank. measure, of which 5 art.
were given through the cultivators outside the gate, remainder through
us 5 art. by kank. measure, 5 art. by kank. measure.

Then we have a piece of yellow sandstone inscribed in Greek,
which must have been let into the wall of a foundry; the date is
perhaps 1 October 641. “With the Flelp of the One God to Appa
losephios Bishop who Built this Bronze Foundry for the Holy
Church in the Name of J. C. Amen in the Month Phaophi of
the 4th Year of the Indiction.” The term used for foundry
chalkeutikon ergasterion, is not found elsewhere. At this time the
Church had gained a very strong economic position, acquiring
or building workshops of many kinds. 37

In 316 we find a guild of ironsmiths at Oxythynchos gave a
receipt to the authorities through their monthly president,
Aurelios Severos son of Sarmates:

1 have received from Aurelios Agathoboulos son of Alexandros, banker
in charge of the Public Receipts in the Official Bank of Oxyrhynchos
in accordance with the Order of the said Most Estimable Logistes,
the appointed sum which was to be ordered to be paid to us as the price
of one hundred-weight of usable iron intended for public works of the
City, namely 6 talants in full. 38

226 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

We may note that though the term chalkeus above is translated
bronzesmith, in fact it was used for almost any kind of smith.
The ironsmiths are called siderochalkeis, literally “ironbronze-
smiths”. Already, in the Odyssej, chalkeus is used of a goldsmith
and/or an ironsmith. A lead-worker, Aurelios Pamouthios, in
579 stood as surety to the heirs of Flavios Apion that Aurelios
Abraham, son of Herminos and Herais, who came from the estate
Great Tarouthinos (also belonging to the heirs), would remain
where he was, “together with his dear ones and wife and herds and
all his possession”. If Abraham defaulted and went off, Pamouthios,
son of Georgios and Anniana, “coming from the City of Oxy-
rhynchos”, would have to pay 8 gold solidi. 39

Gems and semi-precious stones found in Egypt, included agate,
amethyst, beryl, calcite, chalcedony, carnelian, garnet, haematite,
jasper red and brown, peridot (from an island in the Red Sea),
quartz, turquoise, sard, sardonyx, onyx, green felspar (amazonite,
probably the stone called emerald, the gem itself being imported
from India). The Stockholm Papyrus cites as materials used in
making artificial gems and dyes: Cyprian and Galatian copper,
Kappadokian salt, asphalt, Spanish tin, mercury, Kimolian
earth, Makedonian chrjsokolla, Knidian and Syrian kokkos,
Pontic honey, Indian crystal, Armenian blue, asbestos, resin
from Palestine or Tomoi, Pontic henna, indigo, Skythian bark,
Phrygian stone, Sinopic earth, orpiment, litharge. 10

In The Paradise of the Holj Fathers, which we have in a Syriac
version, we hear how the Abba Makarios practised a holy fraud
on a rich, unmarried woman of Alexandreia:

From his youth up he had been a skilful workman in the cutting of
gems and he went to her and said, “Certain very precious emeralds
and gems have fallen into my hands, and whether they have been

29. Heaps and cones of incense

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 227

stolen or not I do not know; their value cannot be ascertained, because
they are above price, but the man who has them will sell them for five
hundred dinars. 41

The woman gave him the money, which he gave to the poor.
Later she asked what he had done, and he took her to his house,
where she saw the decrepit folk he kept.

Plinius remarks that to tell genuine from false gems was
extremely difficult:

especially as we have discovered how to transfer genuine stones of one
variety into false stones of another. For example, a sardonyx can be
glued-up so convincingly by sticking three gems together that the
artifice cannot be detected. A black stone is taken from one species, a
white from another, and a vermilion-coloured stone from a third, all
being excellent in their way. And further, there are treatises by
authorities, which I at least shall not deign to mention by name,
describing how by means of dyestuffs, emeralds and other transparent
coloured gems are made from rock-crystal, or a sardonyx from a sard,
and similarly all the other gemstones from one stone or another. And
there is no other trickery that is practised against people more
profitably.

This reference to books on tinctures suggests that alchemic or
near-alchemic works were partly misunderstood. Plinius goes on
to give some rules for testing gems. First, do it early, not later
than 10 a.m., and then look for weight, coolness, and structure.

In artificial stones globules deep below the surface, rough particles on
the surface itself, filaments, inconsistent lustre, and brightness that
fails to strike the eye. The most effective test is to knock off a piece of
the stone so that it can be baked on an iron plate; but dealers in precious
stones do not unnaturally object to this, as likewise to testing with a
file. 42

Clement records an odd belief that had grown up about the cult-
statue of Sarapis at Alexandreia, which had, in fact, been made
under Ptolemaios I. The historian Athenodoros, he declares,
wrote that:

Sesostris, the [legendary] Egyptian king, after subduing most of the
nations of Greece, brought back to Egypt a number of skilled crafts¬
men. He therefore gave personal orders that a statue of Osiris his
ancestor should be elaborately wrought at great cost; and the statue
was made by the artist Bryaxis, not the famous Athinian but another of

228 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

the same name, who used a mixed and varied [poikilos\ set of material
in its construction. He had filings of gold, silver, bronze, iron, lead,
and even tin; and not a single Egyptian stone was left out, there being
bits of sapphire, haemetite, emerald, and topaz as well. After reducing
them all to powder and mixing them, he stained the mixture dark blue,
so that tne statue s colour is nearly black and mingled the whole with
the pigment left over from the funeral rites of Osiris and Apis. Thus he
moulded Sarapis: whose very name implies this link with funeral rites
and the construction out of burial material, Osirapis being a compound
from Osiris and Apis. 43

Here we meet the dyeing of metals and stones, the connection of
this process with death-rebirth ritual, the notion that a cosmic
god ought to be made up out of all the main metals (planetary
systems), and the further notion that this god in his underworld
or death-aspect should be black (like the primary matter of the
alchemist).

The Empire exported both gems and false precious-stones to
the east. At Virapatnam, the Roman-Indian emporium near
Pondicherry, large numbers have been found, some made of
glass, dating from the first half of the ist century a.d. Accounts
of Chinese embassies about 97, 220-64, and 420-78 refer to
imitation-gems from Syria. 44 Records dealing with western
contacts mention the Nightshining Stone, a Syrian product, and
western sources tell of precious stones luminous in the dark:
perhaps chlorophane, which, despite synonyms like pyrosmaragd,
is not an emerald or beryl but a fluorspar, of which many varieties
have strong phosphorescence and fluorescence on being heated
or scratched in a dim light. 48 There may be a link with the Indian
cobra-stone or napct-kallu^ said to be used by cobras to attract
fireflies and to lie behind the sacred jewel famous in Japan as
hoshi-no-tama. The wealth of gold and jewels described in ancient
and early medieval writings about the East Roman palaces and
temples were, in fact, gilt copper and coloured glass. 46

Fire-effects were used by the western jugglers taken home to
China by the embassy of 120 to Shan (on the Burmese border).
The jugglers performed before the emperor An on New Year’s
Day 121, they could conj ure, spit fire, bind and release their
limbs without aid, interchange the heads of cows and horses, and
dance cleverly with up to a thousand balls”. Jugglers had already
been mentioned in the Parthian missions of Chang Chhien’s
time, about 120 b.c. 47

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 229

As for colouring materials, deposits of gypsum between
Ismailia and the Red Sea, and along the Red Sea coast, were used
mainly for making plaster; the Romans also taught the Egyptians
how to use lime for this purpose; and both gypsum and lime were
used for whiting. Near Syene and in the western oases red and
yellow ochres were found; the yellow, calcined, becomes red,
and no doubt both kinds were used in red paint. Ochre and san-
daraca also came from Topazos, a Red Sea island; and the blue
pigment called caeruleum that came from Egypt may have been
azurite, found in the eastern deserts and Sinai, or an artificial
fruit. Dyeing had been practised from predynastic days. The five

30. Cones of incense; lady and servant with cones

main dyes cited in the Leyden Papyrus X and the Stockholm
Papyrus are archil (orchil), a purple got from certain sea-algae
on rocks in the Mediterranean; alkanet, a red from the roots of
the Alkanna tinctoria; madder, a red from the roots of the Rubia
tinctorum and Rubia peregrina; kermes, a red from the dried
body of a female insect found on an evergreen oak; and woad,
got by fermenting the leaves of the Isatis-tinctoria. Woad was
certainly grown in the Fayum from the Christian era, and pro¬
bably earlier. In several documents of the 2nd century a.d. we
find it prohibited as a crop, though no reason is given. 48 As a
mordant or fixing agent, alum seems chiefly used. Plinius describes
the method without naming the mordant:

230 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

After pressing the material, which is white at first, they saturate it, not
with colours, but with mordants calculated to absorb colour. This done
the tissues, still apparently unchanged, are plunged into a cauldron of
boiling dye and are taken out the next moment fully coloured. It is a
singular fact too that though the dye in the pan is of one uniform colour
the material when taken out is of various colours, according to the
nature of the mordants that have been respectively applied. These
colours too will never wash out. 49

He mentions also a secret method known to the Egyptians for
bringing out the design on stuffs.

The industry of dyeing and fulling was closely connected with
weaving. The bids or reports of fullers and dyers lack details,
but some sort of government control is implied. The accounts of
the temple at Soknopaiou Nesos show payment made for taxes
on a fulling works at Neilopolis; and the guild of dyers evidently
requested a cession of the lease of the temple. 50 Probably the
temple held the lease from the State and sublet to others. In the
160s:

The Fullers Dyers from the Arsinoite Nome were summoned and
appeared. Longeinos, advocate, stated:

Of these men, some are fullers and others dyers by trade, and for
the tax on trades the fullers pay 1092 dr. yearly and the dyers 1088
according to tariff and custom. A certain Maximos, appointed inspector
wrongly entered against them a larger sum than was due. So they
appealed to the Prefect, who referred them to his Highness the
Epistrategos Crassus. The latter summoned the Eklogistes of the Nome
and ordered him to verify the accounts of the last twenty years, and.

31 ■ Relief of Roman goldworker, aurifer

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 23I

on his reporting that no more had been paid than was sanctioned by
the tariff, decided that they should pay on this scale, and they have done
so up to the present time. A superintendent of the tax on trades has
now been appointed, who wants to demand from them a larger amount
than that in the tariff, and they therefore petitioned the strategos, adding
a statement. . . , but as nothing was done by the strategos, they were
obliged to appeal to you.”

Protarchos, advocate, said: . . in accordance with the decision of
Crassus ... a report on the subject was laid before his Highness
Liberalis, who made an endorsement that they should be obliged to
pay.”

Severianos said, “When the Eklogistes is present.. .” 51

In 172 an offer was made by Heron to the ten superintendents
of the leasing of the dyeing monopoly at Arsinoe for a rental of
300 drachmai. Heron, who lived in the quarter of the Temple of
Sekneptynis, was to make himself responsible for other charges
falling in on the lessee if he gained the right of superintending
the weaving-business in Archelais village. 52 To the 2nd-3rd
centuries belongs an order “to the head-policeman of Tarouthinou
Epoikion: send Andromachos and Paous, weavers ... at the
petition of the collectors of the dyeing trade”. 53

In some abstracts of contracts of the late 2nd century we meet
sales connected with a dyeing-shop:

. .. and the drains in vacant spaces to the west of the workshop, the
use of \ the above-cited being reserved for Epeus son of Sarapion,
freedman of Demetrous daughter of Ploutarchos, of the said city
[Oxyrhynchos], for his lifetime in accordance with the aforesaid will,
and ... at the workshop and drains. The adjacent areas are on the
south land of the heirs of Damas, on the north land of Philoneikos, on
the east a street, on the west a garden.

Sarapias and Aunchis, both daughters of Harthonis son of Paapis,
and their mother Terathonis, daughter of Zoilos son of Sarapion son of
Petoousarapis, have sold the produce and roofs and dyeing-workshops
jointly constructed, which belongs to them in the aforesaid dyeing-
place, and the leaden pot and earthenware cask which they possess
there, and further the vacant spaces they possess to the west of work¬
shop. 54

In a document of 381, Aurelios Ploutarchos of the village of
Phoboou in the 5 th Pagus or District of the Oxyrhynchite Nome
made himself the guarantor of a loan made by a dyer Aurelios. . .
son of Heraklas of the city to a friend of his, Philonikos, son of

232 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Besammon. The loan was 4,200 myriads of denars of silver “on
account of extra payments in accordance with the contracts if . . .
made by me [Ploutarchos] in order that you [the dyer] may have
security from me until the repayment of the sum”. 56

In a 6th century document a purple-dyer from Alexandreia
hires out his services to two businessmen. Andreas and Petros,
for a period of two years, during which he is to work at their
premises. In return he is to get 11 solidi less 5 carats, with 92
carats as advance payment. His name is Aurelios Menas, son of the
blessed Abramios. 56 In a document of 399, also from Hermopolis,
we meet in a fragmentary petition to the nyktostrategos the name
Aurelios Annan loses. Apparently the Jewish name “Annan”
has been left unhellenised. 57 And about 570 the lessee of a shop,
in the southern agora of Antinopolis below the dwelling-house
of the lessor, was a Jew Peret who meant to turn the site into a
dyeing-works at a monthly rent. The lease was determinable
(as often at this time) at the lessor’s will. Peret, son of Iouab and
Rhosyne, paid 11 carats of gold at the end of each month.
Previously the place had been a general store. 58

In the Gnostic Gospels of Philip much use is made of imagery
from the crafts. God is compared at length with a good dyer who
blends his colours. The breath of the glass-blower blowing a vase
is the simile for the pneuma. The destiny of men is linked with that
of the ass turning a mill, walking miles and miles, but finding
himself at the end, for all Ids pains, wretchedly where he started. 59

We may complete this chapter with a glance at drugs, cosmetics
and fermenting processes. The papyri have many lists of drugs
and medicines, which need not, however, detain us. A document
of 18 May 253, concerned with the registration of druggist’s
stock, shows how carefully such matters were controlled. Aurelios
Neoptolemos, son of Dioskoros of Oxyrhynchos, was writing to
three men, lessees of the monopoly of the alum industry:

In accordance with the orders of Aelius Sabeinos the most excellent
procurator of Hermes, I make a punctual return of the items which I
have received from the previous lesees of the industry as listed below:

Alum from Psobthis, talants weight; and split alum, 30 mnai
weight Melanteria , 12 tal. Miltos. 7 tal. Misy, 450 loaves [or pellets] ... 5
tal. Ochre from the Oasis, 3 tal. Salt, 5 tal..., 5 tal... 2 measures. I
have remitted the price of all these, in full, as is customary in accordance
with the receipts I hold. 60

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 233

The five items that survive in the text all have a medical use;
four are also pigments, and the fifth is a mordant (alum). Deposits
of alum and ochre were found in all the oases, but here we are
referred to Psobthis, capital of the Little Oasis, from which alum
was brought on camel-back to the Fayum. The alum monopoly
there is well-attested. Camel-drivers paid a toll at the gate of town
or village. In 145:

Through the Bank of Sabeionos in the Treasuries Quarter. Ischyrion,
son of Aphrodisios, and his fellow supervisors of the alum monopoly
in the Arsinoite Nome, to Panouphis, son of Tesenouphis and of
Stotoetis, of the village of Soknopaiou Nesos in the Division of
Ilerakleides, Camel-Driver, stating that he has received, for the toll
[paid to him] on the 30 light talants of alum which he transported from
the Litde Oasis to the Arsinoite Nome through the toll-gate of Nynpou,
at the rate of 1 dr. 3 ob. per talant, 45 dr.

And as the said quantity equals 12 metal talants, he has received for
their transport, at the rate of 7 dr. 3 ob., 90 dr., making in all 135 dr.
Ischyrion has received from the supervisors in the Little Oasis through
the above-named camel-driver the 12 metal talants of alum . . . the
customary 6J%. 61

The 6|% payment is obscure; in some cases the government
deducted that amount for payments in advance, but that hardly
seems the case here. The journey in question took 8 to 9 days by
camel. From a document of 229 in which a superintendent (of
the Prefect’s Boats) writes to three ex-magistrates of Oxyrhynchos,
who superintend the alum monopoly, we learn how many state¬
ments had to be made out. “The 6 five-day accounts of the alum
monopoly, from the 1 st to 5 th of the month Thoth of the present
year, which you have sent, 2 for the dept, of the Dioiketes, 1 for
the Roman [?] Archives, 1 for the Nome’s Procurator, 1 for his
Bureau, 1 for the Oikonomos, were received by me on the 20th
of the month and forwarded.” We also have a letter, dated 300,
from a lessee:

Aurelios Makrobios, Lessee of the Administration of Alum, through
me, Kaisarios, clerk, to Aurelios Isak, greeting. I have sent you 1
Italian lb. of alum through Isidores, and 2 ounces 8 carats of nasturtium,
powder. 16th, 15th, and 8th Year, Tybi 28. 62

To judge from the connection with kardamon, the alum here was
to be for medical use.

In early days drugs and medicines were closely connected with

234 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

cosmetics and incense: all were life-giving substances. Hence the
world of the gods was depicted as drenched in perfumes and cos-
metical elements; and scents and incense were offered up to them.
In ancient Egypt the priest who supervised embalming had a
name connected with the knowledge of herbs, wt. The Akkadian
word for ointment is closely connected with the name of the
priest who made up the incense offerings, with the word for
anointing-oil and the vase holding it or the spatula distributing
it. The word for aromatic herbs denotes also resins and gums, all
substances oo2ing or filtering from the plants, and is related to
words denoting samples, medical herbs, unguents or pastes. The
Egyptian word for the gums, kmjt, became in Greek kommi, and
ultimately our own gum . 63 Though the Egyptians had a word for
smell, they always called perfumes “the fragrance of the gods”. 64

The smell of incense accompanied a god and made his presence
known. This connection of the smell and the god’s advent is
brought out, for instance, in the legend of Queen Hatshepsut’s
begetting, birth, and education. So, in turn, perfumes helped to
lure gods or luminous spirits (those of the just dead) or to repel
evil spirits (those of the unjust dead). The dead (the spirits of the
unjust) fled before the gods; they therefore also fled from incense.
A captured town was fumigated to drive out the previous gods
and bring in the Egyptian ones; and the maladies caused by evil
spirits were cured by fumigation. 63 Thus in a lantern-rite the
Ptolemaic magician evoked the gods:

You will say the formula 7 times on the boy [medium]. So that he won’t
see the lantern, he has his eyes closed. Then you’ll throw pure incense
into, the stove and put a finger on the boy’s head with closed eyes. When
you’ve done that, order him to open his eyes before the lantern and
he’ll see a god-shadow by the lantern. 66

Bad smells repelled. Maladies caused by the gods might be cured
by fumigating the sick man with unpleasant things. “Pound
together honey, fresh olives, northern salt, piss of a menstruating
woman, ass-shit, tomcat-shit, pig-shit, the plant ewnek ... so as
to make a compact mass and use for fumigation round the man.”
As places from which the gods have gone are opened up for
daimons, the appearance of the latter can best be precluded by the
concoction of stinks. Thus a magician evokes the spirit of a
damned person by burning ass-shit in a cauldron. In evocations
with the aid of a vase and a medium:

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS

235

I low to spell a vase quickly so that the gods may come and tell you
always the truth. Throw into the fire a crocodile’s eggshell or what
you find there: the vase will be at once spelled. How to force them to
speak. Throw a frog’s head into the stove and they’ll speak. How to
bring the gods with living force: Throw into the stove crocodile bile
powdered with incense. To force them to come at once, throw into
the stove a small anise-bough and the above-cited eggshell and you’ll
spell the vase at once. To fetch a living man, throw in blue vitriol and
he’ll come. To evoke a luminous spirit, throw in a large amulet with
some crystal, and the luminous spirit will come. If you throw in the
heart of a hyena or hare, it’d be very good.

To evoke a drowned man, throw in a seacrab. To evoke a dead man,
throw in some ass-dung and the amulet of Nephthys, and he 11 come.
To fetch a robber, throw in powdered saffron and alum. To make the
gods come and the vase work quickly the spells, take a scarab, drown
it in the milk of a black cow, and throw into the stove. The vase will
be spelled at once and the light will appear. If you want anything
whatever to go off, throw in monkey-shit and each will go to his place
when you recite the formula of dismissal.

Amulet recommended for binding on the body of him performing
the magic with a vase’s help, for quick spells. Take a band of 16 linen
. threads, 4 white, [4 green], 4 blue, 4 red. Knot it and water it with
peewit blood. Then tie it to a scarab in its solar form, drowned enveloped
in a purse of the finest weave, and tie it on the body of the boy who
exercises the magic with a vase’s help. Then he quickly creates spells,
without hesitation. 67

The method for making perfumes was probably some primitive
form of distillation. Thus some tribes near the Nile sources macer¬
ate herbs in water, cover the vessels with strips of cloth steeped
in grease or fat, then boil till all the scents, evaporating, have
been fixed in the fat or grease, which can be scraped off. Such
methods must have been used in very ancient times. But certainly
flowers were steeped in layers of fat, being replaced as soon as
their perfumes had been absorbed. We see the resulting pomades
as balls or cones attached to the heads of people at merrymakings,
they also provided a normal part of the make-up of an Egyptian
lady. In maceration the flowers were dipped into fat or oils at
about 6j 0 C. and the mixture was strained off. Also, men learned
to express the flowers or seeds. First they trod the materials in a
tub, then used a simple press of linen-cloth twisted at either end
by a stick. By the 3rd dynasty they had improved the device by
replacing one of the sticks with a noose attached to one of two

236 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

uprights carrying the bag-press. No advance was made till the
classical world invented the beam-press and the screw-press. 68

Egyptian eye-paints were ground on a palette, the name of
which seems connected with the word “to protect”: not simply
from disease, but in the religous-magical sense. The paints or their
ingredients were often offered to the gods or were used on the
divine statues; they are often mentioned with regard to the Eye of
Horos. Till a late stage in Egyptian history it was usual to paint
the upper eyelid black with galena, the lower green. 69 The Akka¬
dian term for galena gave birth to the Arabic word kohl, which,
from meaning a specific eyepaint, came to denote a finely divided
powder, then a subtle spirit, and finally emerged as our alcohol.
In Egypt the cheeks and lips were coloured with red ochre, often
with a lipstick of reed holding a small piece of ochre at each end.
The Sumerians seem to have preferred yellow ochre, sometimes
called golden clay or face-bloom (the face as a flower). 70

Incense in Egypt was the Fruit of the Gods; a later term seems
linked with the word for peace and happiness. The Ptolemaic
period saw the greatest expansion of varieties. By the 1st century
a.d. the more costly kinds of incense were scarce, replaced by
resins from coniferous trees or terebinth, which may have been
the original incense used before the Pyramid Age. 71 Alexandreia
was the great manufacturing centre for cosmetics and perfumes,
outdistancing towns like Antiocheia or Laodikeia, let alone old
Greek sites like Korinth or Chaironeia with its krinos -lily ointment.
We must not, however forget, Mendes, the home of Bolos, which

32. Egyptian lady using powderpuff

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 237

was an important place for scent-production. Plinius, commenting
on changes in fashion, says that the perfume of Delos had to make
way for that of Mendes as that of Korinth for that of ICyzikos
and so on. Athenaios remarks of henna, “the metopion and the
Mendesian are made best in Egypt; the metopion is produced
with the oil got from bitter almonds.” Despite the pre-eminence
of Alexandreia there was much local production of unguents and
the like. A town such as Oxyrhynchos had its Street of the Oint¬
ment-Makers. For a while a manufacturing centre in Campania
competed with Alexandreia. There was a guild of unguentarn at
Pompeii, but Capua with its Seplasia Quarter was the main pro¬
ducer. We hear of various fakes, e.g. white drops interspersing
the resin from pitchpine—“closely resembling frankincense, so
that when mixed together they’re indistinguishable to the eye;
hence the adulteration practised in the Seplasia.” This quarter
also faked its medical wares. “Ready-made plasters and salves
are now on the market, and deteriorated goods and the deliberate
falsifications of the Seplasia find their way into the mortar.”
The Capuans thus ended by ruining their name and losing trade. 72

Magical qualities were at times attributed to cosmetics. Thus,
at Rome, the olive-oil mixed with dust and sweat scraped by
strigils from the dirtied body of gladiators and athletes was
collected and sold as rhypos for the manufacture of unguents,
which were believed to confer something of the power and
fascination of the fighters on the ladies.

In a passage where Philon sees the whole universe and its
processes symbolised in scents, we are made to feel how close
the cosmetical and the alchemic workers could be. Philon is
dealing with Exodus xxx (34):

And I imagine these four ingredients of which the whole perfume is
composed are emblems of the four elements of which the whole world
is made. He likens the statke to water, the onycha to land, the galbanon
to air, and the pure transparent frankincense to fire. For stakte, deriving
its name from the drops \stagones\ in which it falls, is liquid; and onycha
is dry and earthlike; the sweetsmelling galbanon is added to give a
representation of air, for there is fragrance in the air; and the
transparency in frankincense serves to represent fire.

On this account too he has separated the things with weight from
those that are light, uniting the one class by a closely-connecting
combination and bringing forth the other in a disunited form: as
where he says, “Take to yourself sweet odours, stakte, onycha .” These

238 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

things, weighty, he mentions unconnectedly, as they are symbols of
earth and water. But afterwards he starts afresh with the other class,
which he cites in combination: “And the sweet spice of the galbanon
and the transparent frankincense,” as these again are in their nature
emblems of the light things, air and fire.

And the harmonious composition and mixture of these things is
truly his most ancient and most perfect holy work. That is, the Universe.
Speaking of it under the emblem of perfume, he thinks it is bound to
show gratitude to its creator. So that in name the composition care¬
fully fabricated by the apothecary’s art may be offered up—but in
reality the whole world, created by divine wisdom, may be con¬
secrated and dedicated, being a burnt offering of early morning and
again of evening. For such a life as this becomes the world: continually
and unceasingly to be giving thanks to its Father and Creator, so as
to stop short of nothing but evaporating and reducing it into its original
element, to show that it stores up and hides nothing, but dedicates
itself wholly as a pious offering to the god who created it. 73

The Talmud remarked that “the world cannot exist without a
perfumer or a tanner.” 74

Behind all these processes, of metallurgy as of perfumery,
there lay the work of the kitchen. An examination of Akkadian
and Egyptian terms shows that many which originated from some
operation concerning food were taken over by various craftsmen
and applied to the operations of the unguent-cooker, the miner,
the metallurgist, the dyer. Similarly kitchen-apparatus provided
the basis on which alchemic apparatus were developed. 75

An alchemic text, probably of the 3rd-4th centuries, states,
“This Water acts like leaven, producing the like by the like. As the
leaven of bread, little as it is, ferments a great quantity of dough,
so also a little gold can ferment the whole dry matter.” It seems
that a leaf of gold was dissolved first in the water on this fermenta¬
tive principle. 76

Zosimos is said to have given a recipe for beer. The drying in
the sun was no doubt meant to peel off the bitter husks:

Take well-selected fine barley, macerate it a day with water, then spread
it for a day in a spot exposed to an air current. Then moisten the whole
again for 5 hours and set in a handled vessel with its bottom pierced
like a sieve. The rest must be ground up and a dough made with it
after yeast is added, just as in breadmaking. Next the whole is put away
in a warm place; and as soon as fermentation has set in enough, the
mass is squeezed through a cloth of coarse wool or a fine sieve, and
the sweet liquid is collected. But others put the parched loaves into a

ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS 239

waterfilled vessel and subject this to some heating, but not enough to
I,ring the water to a boil. Then they remove the vessel from the fire,
pour its contents into a sieve, warm the fluid again, and then put it
aside. 77

We see there a primitive system of malting.

Finally we may cite a later text from Paracelsus, which finely
brings out the way in which alchemy was bound up with all
craft-techniques of transformation: “The baker is an alchemist
when he bakes bread, the vinegrower when he make wine, the
weaver when he makes cloth; therefore whatever grows in
nature useful to man—whoever brings it to the point to which
it: was ordered by nature is an alchemist.”

Now we may turn back to the alchemists. With Maria we find
ourselves on comparatively solid ground.

33. Pompeian painting of loves as chemists

241

Maria the Jewess

There is one other Egyptian alchemist who must be mentioned,
though he is a somewhat shadowy figure: Chymes or Chemes,
cited by Zosimos as an eminent author. Olympiodoros also
mentions him a few times. His name seems to personify the art
and he is made to take Parmenides as authority for the axioms:
The All is One; by it the All is engendered; One is All and if the
All did not contain everything it could not engender it. These
axioms were written round magic circles and serpents with the
figures of metals or plants in the middle. Zosimos associates
Chymes with Maria, and it is possible he is of her period and
school. 1 There is also a reference, in a text on Goldmaking, to
Chyth, Orpheus, and Kleopatra, but Chyth may well be a copying
error. 2

We have noted how famous names are brought into the motley
lists of alchemists, as also into spells, or else titles are added to
familiar names. Petasios becomes King of Armenia; Kleopatra,
the Queen of Egypt; Gebir among the Arabs, King of India.
Alexander heads some Greek MSS; the emperor Heraklios is
inserted, and we hear of “the Precepts of the Emperor Julian”. 3
The Christians and the Jews brought in Biblical names. Moses
naturally plays a considerable part. One MS opens: “And the
Lord said to Moses, I have chosen by name Bezaleel, priest of the
Tribe of Juda, to work gold, silver, copper, iron, all objects of
stone, of wood, and to be the master of all the arts.” The reference
was to Exodus xxxi. This MS is perhaps the treatise elsewhere
mentioned as The Domestic Chemistry of Moses . 4 We meet also a
diplosis, or gold-doubling, of Moses:

Copper of Kalais, i ounce, orpiment, native sulphur, i ounce, and
native lead, i ounce, decomposed realgar [arsenic sulphide] i ounce.
Boil in radish oil, with lead, 3 days. Put it in a roasting pan and set
this on the coal till the sulphur is driven out, then take it off and you’ll

MARIA THE JEWESS

find your product. Of this copper take 1 part and 3 parts of gold.
Melt it, fusing strongly, and, with God’s help, you’ll find it all changed
to gold. 5

The text is corrupt. The product would contain about 66 % gold,

3 3 % of an alloy of copper, lead, and arsenic, and in colour and
resistance to chemical action would closely resemble pure gold.
The alchemist might well think he had got gold by means of the
gold-yellow colour of the orpiment. He would then argue that if
gold could convert something like its own weight of copper and
silver into gold, why should it not do the same to large quantities
of base metals? While silver gives gold a greenish colour, and
copper gives it a reddish one, the admixture of both copper and
silver hardly alter the look. The alchemists though the gold acted
as a seed which grew at the expense of the copper and silver till
the whole mass became gold. He might have argued that a plant-
seed drew on the earth around it and transformed it into a plant
vastly larger than the seed.

In the Hermetic text XIII, Tat is given his instruction by
Hermes “upon the Mountain”—suggesting both the Sinai of
Moses and the mystery-mountains of Zoroastrian revelation.
Magical and astrologic spells are attributed to Moses in the Leyden
papyri; and in a demotic spellbook he is brought oddly into a
charm to gain a woman’s love:

My heart languishes, my heart loves. As a she-cat sighs after a tomcat,
as a shewolf sighs after a wolf, as a bitch sighs after a dog, as the son
of Sopdet sighs after Moses coming to the walls of Ninaret [Os] to
offer up water to his god, to his supreme master, to his Yaho, Sabaho,
to his Glemora, Moses, Plerobe, Su, Mio, Abrasaks, Senklau, so N
daughter of N sighs after N son of N.®

Solomon appears especially in exorcisms; his Labyrinth is drawn
in a couple of alchemic MSS. 7 Zosimos refers to Judaic writings,
some going back, he says, to Noah; he also mentions the transla¬
tion of the Bible into Greek and Egyptian, attributing the work
to a single person—an old erroneous idea. A recipe is assigned
to Oseas King of Israel; and other texts gave the names of Abra¬
ham, Isaac, Jacob, Sabaoth, and so on. 8

The hope of understanding and controlling material process
was seen as the struggle to bring about the regeneration of matter,
which in turn was indissolubly linked with the struggle to rise
above the realm of necessity (slavery) into the freedom of true

243

242 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

human integration. The realm of necessity was above all regarded
as the realm of mechanics, of mathematically determined laws,
of the planetary systems considered to rule the lives of men in all
details large or small. The realm of necessity was identified with
the realm of the body, an organism controlled by a deterministic
mechanism; the realm of freedom was variously taken as that of
pure thought, abstract thought on Platonic lines; that of philoso¬
phic escape into regions felt emotionally to lie beyond the deter¬
ministic mechanism; and that of alchemic transformation into
levels of qualitatively higher organisation. Only the alchemic way
sought both to lay hold of reality and to change it. It took in
both the aspiration to generalised and philosophic thought, and
the passionate emotional desire to transcend the existent world
in its totality; but it linked these aspirations and desires with the
effort to understand and change the concrete world of process.
Its one close affinity was thus, as we noted before, with the reli¬
gious mass-movements that had a powerful element of social
and political discontent underlying their formulations, and which
looked to some kind of social reversal (“last shall be first”, day
of judgment, millennary peace and plenty) even if there was little
awareness of the link except perhaps in some broad simple ways.

We can illustrate these points and at the same time show how
Jewish and Iranian elements mingled with Greek in the images
and ideas that most deeply moved men at this time. Thus we may
take some connected prayers from magical papyri. In the Judais-
ing version, the oldest of those in question, we find the sketch
of an archaic gnosticism. It is a prayer for salvation (of the kind
called a stele) and seems to derive from a yet more important
secret work (now lost). Its liturgical form suggests an association
with the cult of Seth-Typhon, in which all sorts of mysteries
were celebrated. The reciter identifies himself with Man, “the
most beautiful creation of the god who is in heaven”: Man, who is
“made of spirit, of dew, and of earth”—that is, Adam. Man longs
to escape from the rule of Fate and to return to the original form
from which he has fallen. The god invoked is the Propator or All¬
father, the Aion dwelling in the zenith of heaven. He is called Master
of the Pole enthroned on the constellation of the Chariot: that is,
he is the Biblical Sabaoth on his throne and in his chariot. He is
served by myriads of angels and nearby at his side is the aion
Sophia, Wisdom. Adam is here proclaiming that he knows the
divine name of Salvation from the Demon of the Air and from Fate.

MARIA THE JEWESS

Two more obscure texts have the same basis: the Greek magical
papyrus Mimaut, where a prayer to Helios is phrased as if spoken
by Adam, and a Greek formulary (often called the Mithraic
I .iturgy) where the being from whose mouth comes the incanta¬
tions is a Perfect Body made by the right hand of deity: that is,
he is Adam. Born of an impure womb, he laments and hopes that
psychic power will be restored when the Fatality dispensed by
the spheres is wiped out. 9 The alchemists took over the symbol of
Adam for the knowledge which liberates man and gives him
mastery over living process. Zosimos and Olympiodoros see
Adam as the Universal Man, who is identified with Hermes-
Thoth. The four letters of his name—that there were only three in
1 lebrew was unknown—represent the four elements. Olympio¬
doros calls Adam virgin earth, igneous earth, carnal earth, and
sanguineous earth. Eve was assimilated to Pandora, with Prome¬
theus and Epimetheus taken to represent soul and body. In the
Geponika, a recipe for keeping serpents out of pigeon-houses,
attributed to Demokritos, advises the writing of the name of
Adam on the four corners. 10

Maria the Jewess belongs to the earlier alchemic traditions. She
probably existed not very long after Bolos, and was much cited
by Zosimos and other later writers. Zosimos knew her as Maria
or Miriam, the sister of Moses; and we must not forget the role
of Mary, mother of Jesus, in Gnostic evangels. But though there
was the usual tendency to turn early alchemists into mythical
figures, there is no reason why Maria should not have been an
historical person with that name—just as Kleopatra may also have
been, despite the inevitable identification with the great Queen.
Maria and Kleopatra were common enough names. Though Maria’s
writings survive only in quotations, she stands out as a very
definite character, indeed the first alchemist without any of
the indeterminate elements that surround Demokritos-Bolos,
Ostanes, Hermes. She was highly inventive and deeply interested
in chemical experiments and in the instruments that made them
effective and precise. She elaborated all the essential appliance
on which alchemy or chemistry was to carry on for near two mil¬
lennia: kerotakis, hot-ash bath, dung-bed, water-bath. And she
seems to have perfected the apparatus for distilling liquids. She des¬
cribed her methods of construction in much detail, even to the
point of telling how to make copper tubes from sheet metal. She

244 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

seems to have varied her experiments a great deal, but to have
been specially absorbed in alloys of copper and lead. She speaks
of Our Lead as distinct from common lead, perhaps meaning
antimony or some metallic sulphide. Like Hermes and Agatho-
daimon, she is credited with the aphorism, “Unless you strip
bodies of the corporeal state, you will not advance”—that is,
unless you take the metallic state from metals.

The alchemists seem to have been the first investigators of
distillation. At times some sort of sublimation of liquids had been
attempted, e.g. seawater had been heated in a covered cauldron,
then the drops condensed on the lid were shaken off and used as
drinking water. Also oil-of-pitch was made by heating pitch and
condensing the vapour on fleeces; and mercury was produced by
heating cinnabar on an iron saucer in a pan covered by a pot
called ambix, on which the mercury vapour condensed. But none
of these crude devices was truly a still or an alembic, which con¬
sists of three parts: the vessel in which the material is heated, a
cool part for condensing the vapour, a receiver. Maria describes
the still and seems to have invented it. The balneum Mariae or
baine-marie seems first used as a name by Arnald of Villanova in
the 14th century. Zosimos cites Maria’s account:

MARIA THE JEWESS 245

I’ll describe the tribikos to you. For so is called the apparatus made of
copper and set out by Maria, the transmitter of the art. She says as
follows:

Make three tubes of ductile copper a little thicker than that of a
pastrycook’s copper frying-pan. Their length should be about a cubit
and a half. Make three such tubes and also make a tube of a hands-
breadth width and an opening proportioned to that of the still-head.
The three tubes should have their openings adapted like a nail to the
neck of a light receiver, so that they have the thumb-tube and the two
linger-tubes joined laterally on either hand. Towards the bottom of
the stillhead are three holes adjusted to the tubes; and when these are
fitted, they are soldered in place—the one above receiving the vapour
in a different fashion. Then, setting the stillhead on the earthenware
pan containing the sulphur, and luting the joints with flourpaste, place
at the tube-ends glass flasks, large and strong so that they won’t
break with the heat coming from the water in the middle. Here is the
figure. 11

Our manuscript dates from 700 years after Zosimos wrote, so
that the drawing has become rather schematised during its
repetitions; but it is still recognisable as based on the original
illustration by Maria. The standard type of still was described by
Synesios, commenting on a work by Demokritos:

What he [Demokritos] says, Dioskoros, is as follows . . . And put it
into a flask on the hot-ash bed, not over a direct fire but on a gentle
hot-ash bed, which is a kerotakis. During the action of the heat there
is adapted, to the flask above, a glass apparatus with a mastarion [breast¬
shaped cup] fitting on to it. And put it on top of it, and receive the
water that comes up through the breast and keep it and putrefy it.
This is called Divine Water. 12

Zosimos describes another type of still that remained popular
till the 18th century and was called a Cold Still, as the liquid in
the body was not boiled but only gently warmed. Recall Hermes’
Heat of the Brooding Bird.

We can construct a series to show the development of the still.
First came a simple condensation of seawater on a pot-lid as men¬
tioned above: there is a description of the method by Alexandros
of Aphrodisias, a commentator on Aristotle. Then the mercury
was condensed in a flask-like vessel turned upside-down; there is a
description by Dioskorides. Then, probably, the lid was turned in
to provide a container for the distillate. The next and crucial
step was the addition of a pipe to lead the distillate off. But such
9

246 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

a pipe was liable to cause trouble if the liquid boiled up quickly,
right over the still-head. So Maria put in the wide vertical tube
between boiling-pan and still-head. Demokritos got something
of the same effect by using a long-necked flask; and Zosimos,
who didn’t want to boil liquids, kept to the old type. 13

In all, some 80 pieces of apparatus are known: furnaces, lamps,
water-baths, ash-baths, dung-beds, reverberatory furnaces, scori-
fying pans, crucibles, dishes, beakers, jars, flasks, phials, pestles
and mortars, filters, strainers, ladles, string-rods, stills, sublima-
tories, all make their first known appearance as laboratory appara¬
tus in the workshops of the alchemists; and they have persisted,
in variously modified forms, up till today.

There was a reflux apparatus for treating metals with vapours.
The most important of this type was called the kerotakis , meaning
an artist’s palette. An artist painted with a mixture of pigments and
melted wax, and he had to keep his colours on the kerotakis , a
metal sheet shaped like a bricklayer’s trowel, which was kept hot
over a pot of charcoal. The alchemist no doubt took over the
palette in his attempts to soften metals and impregnate them with
colours—just as the artist softened his wax and mixed it up with
the colours, which were thus given a new quality of permanence
and used to create earthly forms in a new dimension, that of the
picture. First the alchemist tried to adapt the kerotakis for the
treatment of metals by means of heated vapours. A vessel below
the kerotakis held a vaporised substance capable of attacking
metals, while an inverted cup, set over the sheet, condensed the
vapour into a liquid which flowed back. (The reflux extractor is
the closed modern analogy.) Then came attempts to refine and
elaborate the heating and condensing systems, and to use some
kind of grating or strainer—perhaps to stop solid fragments of
metal from dropping back into the base. 14

The MSS give us no clear account of how the kerotakis was
used. It has been suggested that something like the following
occurred. The alchemist took sulphur (sometimes mixed with
arsenic sulphides) and put it in the lower part, while the kerotakis
proper held the metal to be treated: copper and perhaps some gold
and silver too. The covers were then luted on, with a small hole
left for the escape of heated air. A small cup was put over the hole.
The alchemist then started off his fire. The vapour of sulphur
made its attack on the metal. The resulting sulphide dissolved in,
or mixed with, the excess of liquid sulphur and ran through the

247

MARIA THE JEWESS

sieve or grating back into the lower part or Hades. The black
mixture of sulphur and sulphides remaining there was the scoria
or black lead. The alchemist desulphurised it by heating or by
treating it with lime or oil-of-nitre, and then smelted it. What
emerged was an alloy of the original metals, doubtless with the
addition of some sulphur and arsenic (if arsenic was present in
the attacking vapours). Kadmia or arsenic (the Etesian Stone)
seem brought in at some stage. During the gentle roasting and
smelting that followed, the kadmia perhaps added zinc to the alloy
and thus created a sort of brass or latten containing copper,
lead, zinc. The alloy thus thus produced was at times used in gold¬
doubling.

3 5. Reconstruction of the three-armed still

All this may seem, it has been pointed out, a very complicated
way of preparing an alloy. But we must remember that with his
limited means of testing and his almost total lack of quantitative
methods for assessing and determining what happened at each
phase of his operations, the alchemist had very little hope of
eliminating chance factors, unnecessary factors, and working
out just what were the essential factors for bringing about the
desired results. He could not be precise as to what composition
he had achieved. His aim throughout was to change the colour
of metals in a certain direction; and even when he did something
that was successful or seemed to be, he had no clear method for

248 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

deciding just what substances or processes had brought the
result about. He could no doubt repeat experiments and get rid
of certain obviously unimportant factors, but he was unable to
grasp the pattern of the process in a truly concise and adequate
way. And the inability to grasp and define the pattern thus in any
one experiment meant in turn that he could not effectively
correlate one experiment with another and build up a coherent
body of chemical knowledge. He had to content himself with
endless drudgery of inconclusive results and marvellous moments
when he seemed to have stumbled on the pure secret of
transformation.

Some operations on the kerotakis were yet more complicated
than the operation described. The alchemist strove to achieve a
series of continuous colour-changes, blackening, whitening,
yellowing, and then rising to the violet glow of matter-in-the-
highest. Perhaps he got his blackness by the conversion of copper
and other metals into their black sulphides. Then he smelted it
into a yellow metal. The whitening was doubtless more difficult.
If the black product had been dried before smelting, it might
have been whitened as a result of the efflorescence of salts from
the Divine Water; or some white material (compounds of
mercury, arsenic, antimony) might have been added. Some final
tincture or a cleaning of the produced metal may have begot¬
ten the iosis. But all this is largely guesswork. 15

In any event it seems to have been Maria who was mainly
responsible for the apparatus which enabled the alchemist to
produce such results as he did get, and which in the end provided
the basis on which chemistry proper could develop.

She seems to have had a strong conviction of the unitary nature of
process. We saw earlier how the Kitab al-Uabib thus described
her. 16 Ibn Umail attributes to her imagery of the above-and-
below type, which accords with her interest in the processes of
the still or the alembic. These processes were seen as the move¬
ment up and down of vapours and water; condensation was a
kind of rain, bringing down the water in a purified form from
the heavens.

The Strength of the Lowest and the Highest—as Hermes the Crown
of the Sages, has said to us—has passed into that Water, and con¬
sequently it will not leave that which has been dissolved in it in dark¬
ness, the water reviving the dust like the rainbearing cloud . . .

249

MARIA THE JEWESS

Maria [Mariya] also said: The Water which I have mentioned is an
Angel and descends from the sky and the earth accepts it on account of
its [the earth’s] moistness. The water of the sky is held by the water
of the earth, and the water of the earth acts as its servant, and its Sand
[serves] for the purpose of honouring it. Both the waters are gathered
together and the Water holds the Water. The Vital Principle [Kiyan]
holds the Vital Principle, and the Vital Principle is whitened by the
Vital Principle. She meant the Coction of the Soul with the Spirit
until both mix and are thoroughly cooked together and become a
single thing like Marble. ...

[As for the Angel] she meant by this the Divine Water which is the
Soul. She named it Angel because it is spiritual and because that Water
has risen from the earth to the sky of the Birba [from bottom to top of
the Alembic],

As for her statement [the Water] descends from the sky, she meant
by this its return to their Earth; and this Angel she mentioned I shall
explain to you another way so that you may be aware of both explana¬
tions, if Allah will. She meant by this the Child which they said will
be born for them in the Air while Conception has taken place in the
Lower [region]—this being through the Higher Celestial Strength
which the Water has gained by its absorption of the Air. Regarding
this, Hermes said: The strength of the Highest and the Lowest will
be found in it. 17

These passages seem genuinely to refer to Maria’s theory, for
they fit in so well with her devices. We may say that she developed
the conception set out by Hermes of the macrocosm-microcosm
relationship and gave it a more dynamic and concrete basis by
linking the above-below system with the actual process of
alchemy in a direct way. We cannot prove that she also worked
out the analogy of mating and childbirth as expression of the
triadic formula; but it is quite possible that she did so. We perhaps
see her woman’s-interests in her use of cooking imagery, her
comparison of the still-tube’s thickness with that of a pastry¬
cook’s copper frying-pan, and her use of flour paste for luting.
It would be in character for her to use the sexual metaphor for
the fusion of substances. That metaphor did exist among the
Greek alchemists, though not in such an expanded form as among
the Arabs and the medieval alchemists of the West. In a work
attributed to John the Archpriest, but actually consisting of
excerpts from Zosimos, we meet the analogy of the alchemical
process to the conception and birth of a child. 18 The imagery of
the water reviving the dust is closely paralleled by passages in

250 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

2 5 I

36. Stages in the evolution of the still

Kleopatra’s Dialogue : “how the highest descends to the lowest...
how the blessed waters descend from on high to visit the dead
afflicted in darkness and shade . . . The cloud sustains them . .
and the cloud waters the plant.” Here the imagery becomes that
of the Osirian Resurrection. Ibn Umail has said further: “They
name this Water also the Rain that revives the Lower World,
and [by] all this [is to be understood] the Pure Silvery Water
which is the Gold of the Sages. The excellent master Hermes
named it the God with Many Names.” 19 Indeed in view of the
certain closeness of these passages from the Ibn Umail with
Greek thought, we may take also the following:

MARIA THE JEWESS

In this water will be found the strength of the Highest and the Lowest.
As Hermes, the excellent sage who is the Ocean of Wisdom, said:

Give it predominance over the Highest and the Lowest. It will then
perform wonders—the thing and its opposite because it will both
blacken and whiten. It will also redden. It will harden the Moist and
soften the Dry. Its brother is the Ash which has been extracted from
the Ash with their Second White Body, which they named the Sanctified
Thirsty Earth; and the Ash, which is the Ferment, they named the Fer¬
ment of Gold. The Gold is their Divine Water; and the Divine Water
is the Ferment of the Bodies; and the Bodies are their Earth. The
Ferment of the Divine Water, which is the Ferment of the Bodies, is
the Ash and it is the Ferment of Ferments.

Maria the Sage, in several places in her books, named it the Rennet,
because it coagulates their Water in their Second Earth, which is their
Second Body. It is the Crown of Victory; and they called it Gold on
account of its excessive whiteness, in connection with the expression:
“their Water in their Second Earth, and their Silvery Water”. They
meant by their words “Mix Gold with Gold” the admixture of Water
and Ash, and their Water and the Second Whitening Body.

Hermes said: O my Son, cultivate Gold in a White Silvery Earth.

Hermes here called their White Water Gold because the Tincturing
Soul is concealed in their Water when the Spirit becomes predominant
over it by reason of its Colour and Whiteness. He called their Whitening
Body, White Silvery Earth. 20

The Alchemical Lexikon gives: “Silvery stream, vapour of sulphur
and mercury”; and the phrase Silvery Water or Water of Silver
is found in at least four other places in Greek texts. As for
the comment about “becoming a single thing like Marble” in the
previous text, we have the parallel in Demokritos-Bolos: If the
medicine becomes somewhat like marble, great is the mystery.” 21
Rennet, however, does not seem to occur in Greek writings, nor
does White Silvery Earth—though White Earth is often found.

We may add that a Maria the Egyptian or ICopt is also men¬
tioned. A Book attributed to Ostanes tells how the philosophers,
having seen a mysterious stone with an admirable colour, could
not make out what it was, and so made a search all over the world
to find the mine from which it came, but could learn nothing.
Then they wrote to Maria to tell her of the wonderful colour and
substance of the stone, about which they had inquired in vain.
They added that the characteristics of this stone were that it was
soft to the touch and shone in darkness. They begged her to tell
them what it was if she knew. She replied that her predecessors

252 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

in the great work had been of the opinion that this stone came
from a mountain in the midst of the sea and that it shone from the
bottom of abysses like a torch in a dark night. We are also told
that Maria wrote to Ostanes to ask his advice on certain matters
and that he replied.

Whether there was any such Maria or whether she was merely
an invention of the Egyptian school, meant to outshine Maria the
Jewess, we have no idea. Probably she was a mere propagandist
fiction. The second passage, however, makes her subsidiary to
the Iranian school. The confusion is made yet more obscure by the
fact that an Arab treatise (known in a Latin version under the
name of Calid and Morienus ) attributes to Maria the discourse with
the philosophers that Kleopatra pronounces in the Greek text,
and that the Fihrist refers to the Book of Maria the Kopt with the
Sages , 22

******

— Jl -U_

p- J

Tnrrrrr

1 «j ,

37. Kerotakis or reflux apparatus, as shown in a Greek MS

Kleopatra

The alchemist Kleopatra seems associated with the school of
Maria. We have under her name an important sheet with diagrams
and a Dialogue. As we noted, she was linked with the famous
Queen Kleopatra, to whom the Arab writer Ibn-Wahs-Chijjah
attributed a book on poisons and to whom the Romans gave a
book on cosmetics. From Aetios we can recover some fragments
of the latter work, for instance the recipe for a smegna or unguent. 1
There is indeed nothing improbable about the Queen being
connected with a work on cosmetics; and as the manufacture of
cosmetics and perfumes contributed to the working-out of
alchemic methods, there may thus be a slight link between her
and the art. The practical aspect of Kleopatra the alchemist
appears in the assignment to her of a work on weights and
measures.

In the school of Kleopatra and Maria we find Komarios, by
whom we have a fragmentary thesis. He was called high priest,
philosopher, and teacher of Kleopatra. 2 Her contact with him
seems like that of Isis with Amnael or Thessalios with Asklepios:
a revelatory initiation. For he is described as seated on a throne
and she learns from him the doctrine she transmits to later
philosophers. His name is possibly derived from the Aramaic
Komar, high priest. 3 Indeed the Dialogue may be a translation
from the Syriac into Greek. 4 However that may be, it is a work of
the utmost interest for the understanding of alchemic ideas and
images.

First, however, the single page called her Goldmaking. The
title is at the top. Three concentric circles enclose axioms. In the
first ring we read: “One is the All and by it the All and in it the
All and if it does not contain the All it is nothing.” In the inner
ring: “The Serpent is One, he who has the Venom with two
Compositions”, synthemata. 5 That is, the effective force comes

254 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

from the unity achieved out of the fusion of two opposites. In
the centre are the signs of mercury, silver and gold; the rayed
sun-sign is that found also in Assyria and in the heretical Valentinian
writings. Below on the left is the serpent Ouroboros making a
circle with his tail in his mouth and enclosing the axiom, “One
the All . On the right is an alembic with two points; on its
furnace is the word phota , flames, lights. 6

Here we see clearly combined the Hermetic doctrine of unity,
the Marian stress on experimental work and on the alembic in
particular, and the triadic formula of what constitutes develop¬
ment. The Dialogue of Kleopatra is in tone close to the passages
attributed to Maria and Hermes by Ibn Umail. The imagery of the
waters reviving the dead is very Egyptian:

Then Kleopatra said to the Philosophers, “Look at the nature of plants,
what they come from. Some come down from the mountains and grow
out of the earth, and some grow up from the valleys and some come
from the plains. But look how they develop. For it is at certain seasons
of the year you must gather them; and you take them from the islands
of the sea and from the most lofty place. And look at the air that
ministers to them, and the nourishment circling round them, so that
they may not perish or die. Look at the divine water that gives them
drink, and the air that governs them after they have been given a body
in a single being.”

Ostanes and those with him answered Kleopatra. “In you is hidden
a strange and terrible mystery. Enlighten us, throwing your light on
the elements. Tell us how the highest descends to the lowest, and how
the lowest rises to the highest, and is united with it, and what is the
element that accomplishes these things. And tell us how the blessed
waters visit the corpses lying in Hades fettered and afflicted in darkness,
and how the Medicine of Life reaches them and rouses them as if
woken by their possessors from sleep; and how the new waters, both
brought forth on the bier and coming after the light penetrates them
at the beginning of their prostration and how the cloud supporting
the waters rises from the sea.”

And the Philosophers, pondering what had been revealed to them,
rejoiced.

Kleopatra said to them, The waters, when they come, awake the
bodies and the spirits that are imprisoned and weak. For they again
undergo oppression and are enclosed in Hades, and yet in a little while
they grow and rise up and put on various glorious colours like the
flowers in spring and the spring itself rejoices and is glad at the beauty
they wear.

For I tell this to you who are wise. When you take plants, elements.

KLEOPATRA 255

and stones from their places, they appear to you to be mature. But they
are not mature till the fire has tested them. When they are clad in the
glory from the fire and the shining colour of it, then rather will appear
their hidden glory, their sought-for beauty, being transformed to the
divine state of fusion. For they are nourished in the fire and the embryo
grows little by little nourished in its mother’s womb; and when the
appointed month comes near is not held back from coming out. Such
is the procedure of this worthy art. The waves and surges one after
another in Hades wound them in the tomb where they lie. When the
tomb is opened, they come out from Hades as the babe from the
womb.” 7

58. Reconstruction of Kerotakis (M=Metals; P=Palette)

The whole background of this passage is essentially Egyptian.
The imagery of the dead lying in their underground caves and
waiting for the waters of resurrection had immemorial roots in
Egypt. If we look at some of the ancient Pyramid texts we seem
to be very close in idiom to the alchemic works though the
earlier phrases refer wholly to the personal immortalisation of the
Pharaoh in a cosmogonic situation. Note how in the following
passage the waters are both those of the reviving Nile and those
from the divine father’s penis, the mother’s vulva, so that the
fusion of natural and sexual imagery in Kleopatra’s parable is
exactly paralleled:

256 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The waters of life which are in the sky, the waters of life which are in
the earth come. The sky burns for you, the earth trembles for you,
before the birth of the god. The mountains divide, a god comes into
being, the god has power over his body. The two mountains divide,
N comes into being, N has power over his body.

Behold N, his feet shall be kissed by the pure waters which come
into being through Atum, which the penis of Shu makes, which the
vulva of Tefnut brings into being. They have come to you, they have
brought you the pure waters which issue from their Father. They
purify you, they fumigate you, N, with incense.

You lift up the sky with your hand. You tread down the earth with
your foot. 8

Kleopatra continues with her metaphor of the womb and then
carries on with her exposition:

The philosophers contemplate their beautiful work, just as a loving
mother does the baby she has borne, and then they seek how they may
nourish it, just as the mother does her infant. But for this art they use
the Waters instead of milk. The art imitates the infant, since it is formed
just as the baby is formed, and when it shall be brought to perfection
in all things, behold the mystery that is sealed up inside.

But now I ^ will tell you clearly where the elements and plants are
found, and I’ll begin by speaking in riddles. Go up to the highest
point in the rugged mountain among the trees, and look, there is a
rock in the mountain-ridge. From this rock take arsenic and use it
for the divine process of whitening. And look, in the middle of the
mountain, below the male there lies the mate with whom he is united
and in whom he delights; for nature rejoices in nature, and without
her there is no union.

Then go down to the Egyptian sea and bring up with you from its
source in the sand the substance called nitron and unite it with the
other things, and it brings forth the all-tingling beauty, and without
it there is no union for the mate in due measure. See how nature cor¬
responds with nature, and when you gather together all things in
equal measure, then natures conquer natures and delight in one another.

See, you wise men, and understand. See the fulfilment of the art
in the joining-together of the bride and bridegroom and in their
becoming one. See the plants and their different kinds. See, I speak to
you all the truth and again I’ll say to you: See and understand that the
clouds, which bear aloft the blessed Water, come up from the sea; and
they water the lands and cause the seeds and flowers to grow. In the
same way our Cloud, coming forth from our Element, bears on high
the divine Waters and gives drink to the Plants and Elements, and
needs nothing from other earths.

KLEOPATRA

257

Again we note how much more vivid is Kleopatra’s writing than
most alchemic texts. Though she treats nature symbolically,
we feel that she has her eye on it and loves it:

See, my brothers, the incredible mystery that is entirely unknown.
See, the truth has been revealed to you. See how you water your earths
and how you nourish your seeds, so that you may cause the fruit to
be borne in its season. Hear then and understand and inquire closely
into what I say.

Take from the four elements the arsenic which is highest and lowest,
the white and the red, the male and female in equal balance, so that
they may be joined to one another. For just as the bird warms her eggs
with her heat and brings them to their appointed term, so yourselves
warm your composition and bring it to its appointed term. And when
you’ve borne it out and caused it to drink of the divine Waters in the
Sun and in heated places, cook it upon a gentle fire with virginal milk,
keeping it from the smoke. Then shut the ingredients up in Hades and
stir carefully until the preparation becomes thicker and does not run
from the fire. Then remove it from the fire; and when the soul and
spirit are unified and become one, project upon the body of silver and
you will have gold such as the treasuries of kings do not contain.

I lades, the underworld of the dead, is the lower part of the
apparatus in question. We shall later explore the symbolism of the
alchemic apparatus. Kleopatra goes on to describe the processes
of transformation as a resurrection from Hades, from the black¬
ness of the lowest forms of matter:

See the mystery of the philosophers which our fathers swore to you
not to reveal or publish. It has a divine Form and a divine Activity.
For that is divine which, by union with divinity, renders substances
divine. In it the spirit acquires a body and mortal things a soul and by
receiving the spirit which escapes from the ingredients they are over¬
powered and overpower one another. For the spirit, full of vanity and
frailty of heart, overpowers bodies so that they are not whitened and
do not receive the beauty and colour with which they are endowed by
the creator. For the body and the spirit and the soul are weakened
through the darkness that extends over them.

The divine, in this idiom, is not an abstract quality, something
outside existence; it is simply the very quick of life, the element
of qualitative change and of transformative leaps which cannot
be reduced to any mechanistic formula; it is present in all things
insofar as they possess qualities and organisational cohesions of

258 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

their distinctive own. The alchemist seeks to grasp the laws, the
dynamic and dialectical systems, at work in the living processes
of change and development; and it is because he gains only
baffled glimpses, despite his conviction of having found the
essential clues, that he feels a darkness clogging and obscuring the
free and clear movement that he intuits and seeks to reproduce.
Identifying, as he does, his own mental and emotional processes
with those of nature, he feels his own confusions, difficulties, and
uncertainties reflected in the behaviour of the substances he treats.

But when the spirit of darkness and of foul smell is rejected, so that
no stench and no shadow of darkness appears, then the body is clothed
with light, and the soul and the spirit rejoice at darkness put in flight
from the body. And the soul, calling to the body now full of light,
cries out, Awaken from Hades! Rise up from the tomb and rouse
yourself from darkness! For you have clothed yourself with spirituality
and divinity, since the voice of the resurrection has sounded and the
pharmakon of life has entered into you!”

Such statements must not be read with the modern connotation
of the words. Just as the divine is the life-force, the spirit is
pneuma , a material substance or force, which is merely subtler,
freer, more volatile than matter in the ordinary sense. Above all,
pneuma is that in each individual which links his share of the life-
force with its universal flow and gives him fellowship with all
things inside the system of complex correspondences and
affinities. The resurrection that the alchemist seeks in himself
and in his materials is not a disappearance into some quite
different dimension of time-space; it is something that exists and
manifests itself here and now, on earth; it is the movement from
a lower level of life to a higher level, from one level of conscious¬
ness to a level with a qualitatively higher centre of organisation.
It is hardly too much to say that the concepts of development
and evolution which in variously limited and imperfect forms
have begun to come up since the 18 th century were present in
alchemic thought in an obscurely intuitive way, incapable of
basing themselves securely on an adequate scientific methodology,
and yet passionately stirring the alchemist with a sense of grasping
the core of the life-process. The intuitions of development thus
fall back all the while into mystical formulations, into sterile
recipes hidden in esoteric diction and symbol—as much to protect
the alchemist against recognising his inability to apply his gnosis as

KLEOPATRA

259

to exclude the profane who would mock at his weaknesses without
being able to share his deep fugitive glimpses of the formative
and integrative processes of nature.

For the spirit is again made happy in the body, as is also the soul,
and runs with joyous haste to embrace it and does embrace it. Darkness
no longer has dominion over the body, since it is a subject of light,
and they will not suffer separation again for eternity. And the soul
rejoices in her home, because, after the body had been hidden in dark¬
ness, she found it filled with light And she united with it, for it had
become divine towards her and it is now her home. For it had put on
the right of divinity and darkness has gone from it. And the body and
the soul and the spirit were all united in love and had become one: in
which unity the mystery has been concealed. In their union the mystery
has been accomplished, its dwelling-place sealed up and a monument
built full of light and divinity.

For Fire has unified and transformed them, and from the hollow ot
its Womb they have gone forth, exactly as from the Womb of the Waters
and of the Air which ministers to them. And Fire brought them forth
from Darkness into Light, from Grief into Joy, from Sickness into
Health, and from Death into Life. It clothed them with a divine
spiritual glory such as they were not clothed with before. For in them
has been hidden the whole Mystery which exists as something divine
and unchangeable.

She goes on with her statement of the complexity of dynamic
transformations in matter. Nature is seen, not as a series of
mixtures in which the ingredients all exist on the same qualitative
level and are thus computable in arithmetical terms or reducible to
various geometrical atomic patterns. The mixtures and the
patterns exist and are relevant to the inquiry; but the problem is
to move beyond them to a grasp of the unseizable moment of
total change, in which there is both continuity and discontinuity.

For the bodies coalesce with one another because of their virtue [their
essential and dynamic quality, which makes them both what they are

and what they may be]. ,

In coming forth from the earth they clothe themselves with light and
a divine glory, since they have grown according to nature and have
undergone a change in form and have arisen from sleep and have gone
forth from Hades. For the Womb of Fire has given them birth and
they have clothed themselves with a glory from it. It has brought
them to a single unity. Their likeness has been perfected in body soul,
soul, and spirit, and they have become one.

KLEOPATRA

260 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

For Fire has been subjected to Water, and Earth to Air, in the same
way as Air with Fire, and Earth with Water, and Fire and Water with
.barth, and Water with Air, and they have become one.

For the One has been formed from Plants and Vapours; and from
Natures and from Sulphur a divine substance has been produced
which pursues every Nature and overpowers it. See, natures have
overpowered and conquered Natures, and as a result they change
Natures and Bodies as well as things that proceed from their Nature.
As the fugitive has entered into the non-fugitive, and that which over¬
powers into that which does not overpower, and they have been united
to one another.

That is the Mystery we have learned, my Brothers, from God and
from our Fathers, the high priest Komarios. See, I have spoken to
you, my Brothers, all the truth that has been hidden away with many
sages and prophets. 3

The philosophers then end the meeting. “You have amazed me
Kleopatra, with what you’ve told us. Blessed is the womb that
bore you.”

Indeed her discourse is the most imaginative and deeply-felt
document left by the alchemists. It has a strong personal tone.
We feel in its deep sense of life and its possibilities, an intense
delight in the beauty of the earth as well as a sustained conviction
in the powers of men to find the most fruitful and harmonious
ways of integrating themselves with nature. She is inspired by the
hope of an elixir, a pharmakon of life, and sees the scientific
quest, not as a thing in itself, an abstract search for knowledge,
but as a means of unimaginably enriching human life by integrat-

39. Ouroboros: St Mark’s MS 299 fi88v

261

ing it consciously in the unitary process of the universe. She seems
to have been the thinker who, for these reasons, most fully set the
imagery of conception and childbirth in the heart of the alchemic
idiom. But before we examine that imagery further, we must
consider the Serpent Ouroboros who appears in Kleopatra’s
Goldmaking. The snake curving round with his tail in his mouth
is an obvious emblem of the unity of the cosmos, of eternity,
where the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. It
summarises the creed of up-and-down down-and-up, -a circular
movement of energies and qualities. It symbolises the Philoso¬
phers Stone or Egg in which All is included and yet a ferment of
changes is going on. We have seen it in Kleopatra’s Goldmaking,
where it appears in both direct and abstract form. In another MS
the serpent is made of three concentric rings. The outermost is
scaly, with head and three ears shown in bright red, while the
eye is white with a black pupil. The middle ring is also scaly and
is coloured yellow, while the inner one, with four feet, was painted
all in green. The four feet represented the tetrasomia, and the
three ears the vapours (perhaps sulphur, mercury, orpiment). In
a third MS we find a stylised version of the last design: two
concentric rings with inscriptions close to those of Kleopatra’s
Goldmaking. A fourth MS has yet another variant; the axioms
are there in red, but the circles are missing. Perhaps a copyist
forgot to put them in. There appear also the signs for gold, silver,
mercury, with those for lead and cinnabar (or the egg). 9

The tail-biting serpent has a considerable role in magic. A
Leyden papyrus gives a good example. The text is in Egyptian
hieratic with Greek inscribed on the inner face. It deals with rites
brought about by Love envisaged as a great thaumaturgic power:
the evoking of phantoms, the construction of images of Love,
the making of a philtre composed of various plants. Recipes tell
how to succeed in an undertaking, to get or send dreams, con¬
sult a deity who appears with a snake’s head, bring someone
bad luck, put a stop to someone’s anger; then processes for refin¬
ing gold, and how to make a talismanic ring by engraving on its
jasper the figure of the tail-biting snake, which encloses the moon
with two stars and the sun above. Love, we may note, appears in
alchemic texts: in the midst of a recipe for transmutation in an
incomprehensible phrase that seems the shred of some old
mutilated treatise. And “Love Gold-extractor”, where we are
dealing with a work by an enigmatic person, Kron-Ammon. 10

KLEOPATRA

262 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Another papyrus, after a long logos made up of many magical
words addressed to the sun, sets out these directions: “the image,
andrias, engraved on the stone is a lion-faced Helioros holding in
his left hand an orb, polos , and [in the right] a whip, and round
about him an ouroboros, and under the bottom of the stone, this
name, keep it secret: acha achacha chach chacrchara chach We'may
note that the grotesque Bes on the back of the Metternich stele
stands on an elliptical cartouche formed by a serpent with tail in
mouth which has been taken as a symbol of the abyss. 11

On the engraved gems we find the Ouroboros enclosing a large
number of different objects, inscriptions or symbols. For instance,
on lapis lazuli, Osiris as a mummy; Sarapis with Kerberos at his
feet; on haematite, the womb-symbol above which stands Isis-
Tyche with sceptre and horn-of-plenty, and probably Anubis as
mummy (? Thoueris); the womb-symbol over which are four
deities, Anubis as mummy, the lion-headed snake Chnoubis, Bes,
Isis with the horn; again the womb, here globular, with Neph-
thys (?), Anubis and Osiris as mummies, Isis-Tyche with horn;
on red jasper, Harpokrates seated on a lotus in a papyrus-boat;
a scarab; three ring signs; a rider design; a six-rayed ring-sign,
an amphora with two drooping boughs that grow leaves and
fruits, or buds—below euthem , probably an error for eutheni,
euthenei , flourish ; a rough figure that seems bound, with a

trident-end or an object like an E turned forward over his head_

compare the trident piercing the Evil-Eye on Syrian bronze
pendants. 12 On a carnelian seemingly distorted by heat we find
a Mil 1 vraic scene: inside the Ouroboros is a head at the top with a
small oval under five cross-marks, perhaps stars; below, charac¬
ters and letters; in the centre a table or couch with bundle, also a
serpent with oxhead, a monster with ram-head on a snake’s neck
supported by the hindquarters of a goat; at the bottom, a jackal
or fox. On one gem the encircling serpent has a seven-rayed
human head which it turns in to the right, facing a seated Sarapis;
there are star, scarab, crocodile, under the throne, and a crescent
and a ladder-sign below the serpent-head. 13

Generally the Ouroboros has in such designs a cosmic force,
which magnifies the spell. With such figures as Sarapis or the
mummied Osiris there may be an underworld significance. The
snake which entwines the body of Aion on Mithraic monuments
certainly shows the strong Time-aspect of the symbol. The word
aion had expanded its means from lifetime, in Homer, to a long

263

space of time, and then at last to eternity by the later Hellenistic
period. At Alexandreia a cult of Aion as the god of Time had
grown up, in association with Kore, the earthmaiden. On the
5 th January a statue of the god was brought by torchlight into the
open from an under-earth sanctuary dedicated to Kore; and while
pipes and tambourines played, it was carried seven times round the
temple, then taken below the ground again. We are told that the
rite signified the birth of Aion on this night by Kore. At Alexan¬
dreia, however, the images do not show the entwining snake;
we see the god seated and naked, his head, hands, and knees
decorated with gold seals. A statue found at Rome shows a god
in a short loincloth encircled by a snake, its head resting on his;
in both hands, pressed close to his body, he holds the ankh, the
life-symbol; beside him stands a goddess, smaller in size, with the
Isiac sistrum or rattle. A third statue found at a country-site
where Domitian had a villa shows the loinclothed god with four
arms, four wings, an eye in his chest, and lion-heads on his knees
and stomach. Two serpents creep up on either side (one along a
tree-trunk, one on a seat-arm); a lion-head and a water-snake
can be seen on the tree-trunk and a three-headed Kerberos sits
by his left foot. Lion and hydra, water-snake, represent the union
and struggle of fire and water, while the four arms and wings stand
for the four winds as the four cosmic forces. Macrobius in his
Saturnalia says that the three heads of Gerberus stands for present,
past and future. Aion became merged with Mithras as god of
Time, and we see the snake twining round his body; sometimes

264 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

the snake bites its own tail. As Helios-Mithras he became a high

god by the 2nd century a.d., but still had his underworld
aspect . 14

The way in which Aion merges with Ouroboros can be seen in
a Secret Stele from a magical papyrus, with its emphasis on
circular motion:

Hail whole structure of the pneuma of the air. Hail, pneuma that
traverses all space from heaven to earth, and after the earth, taken to
the central hollow of the world, right up to the extremities of the
a yss. Hail, pneuma that enters into me, takes possession of me, and
eaves me as God wills in his goodness. Hail, principle and end of
immoveable Nature. Hail, revolution of the stars that tirelessly accom¬
pany your service. Hail, splendour of the solar rays in the service of
the universe. Hail, circle of the Moon that lights up the night with
unequal lustre. Hail, all the pneumata of the eidola of the air Hail

you to whom one gives the hail in benediction. Brothers and Sisters’
Holy Ones.

O great, very great, inconceivable circular edifice of the world-
celestial Pneuma, inside the sky; aitherial, inside aither; watery, earthly’
igneous, aerial; luminous, dark; glittering with the light of the stars’
humid-burning-cold! I praise you, god of gods, you who have put
together the universe member by member, who have made a reservoir
of waters of the abyss by setting them on an invisible foundation
separated heaven from earth, and covered the heaven with eternal
wings of gold, fixed the earth on eternal bases; you who have suspended
the aither at the culminating point of the heavens, spread the air dis-
persed into all places by the self-moving winds, and set the Ocean in a
circle all round; you bring storms, who thunder, launch lightnings
who make rain fall, who shake the earth, you who engender the living’
God of the Aions. You are great, Lord, God, Master of the Universe. 11 *

We can feel how Aion could be a great snake-form spiralling
round in the courses of the stars, twining round all things as the
oceanic serpent, the very pneuma or life-force of the “incon¬
ceivable circular edifice”. If we look back to the consecration of
t e ring for bringing success mentioned above with an Ouroboros
enclosing sun and moon cut on a jasper, see how the enclosing
serpent is directly linked with Aion. On the jasper the name
Abraxas is set over the sun and on the back of the stone; on the
gold circlet of the ring “powerful holy ever-efficacious name Iao
Sabaoth”. During the consecration, with its sacrifice and other
details, a prayer invokes the gods of the heaven, the gods of the
earth, the gods of the middle; the magician presents himself as a

KLEOPATRA

265

sort of ail-god,panibeios. He is the Sun, Aphrodite Typhi, Kronos,
Mother of the Gods, Osiris, Isis, Souchos; he is “Faith [Pis/is]
that has been found among men, and the prophet of the holy
names”; he is “the ever-equal (?), he who is born of the Abyss”.
Also, ‘ ‘I am the sacred bird Phoenix. ’ ’ Then he invokes the Univer sal
God, the ancestral god:

Come to me, you who rise from the four winds, you who have breathed
into man pneuma so that he may live. Master of all the beauties of the
world, listen, who own the hidden and ineffable name. At this name
the demons are gripped with fear, the sun on hearing it, the earth are
smitten with vertigo. Hades is thrown into agitation. At this name,
rivers, sea, pools, fountains are frozen up. At this name rocks are
broken. The heaven is your head, the aither your body, the earth your
feet, the water surrounding you is the Ocean. Agathos Daimon, you
are the lord that begets, nourishes and makes all things grow.

The Good Spirit here seems certainly Aion. Soon after, the text
asks, “What Aion, nourishing the Aion, reigns over the Aions:
the one immortal god?” 16

The Phoenix whom the magician identified himself with was
here a sort of doublet of the Ouroboros, and Aion a symbol of
perpetually renewed time. Another magic text declares, “Hail,
Tyche and Daimon of this place . . . Hail, the Envelopper; that
is, the earth and heaven. Hail, Helios! You are he that is estab¬
lished on the holy foundation in an invisible light. You are the
father of the ever-reborn Aion. You are the father of the unap¬
proachable P by sis [Nature]. You are he that contains in yourself
the mixture of cosmic nature, who have engendered the five
wandering stars [the planets], who are the viscera of the heavens,
the entrails of the earth, the flowing of water, the impetuosity of
fire. . . .” 17 Time is thus identified with Nature, with the mixture
and the flux of things as also with the enduring structure. A
prayer to Apollo (assimilated to Abrasax, Adonai, Ancestral
God, Self-begotten, and Helios) cries, “I adjure the eternal god,
the Aion of all beings, I adjure V by sis born of herself. . .” 18

In the symbolism of Kleopatra and the alchemists in general,
then, the Ouroboros was used to represent the All, which was
One, in its aspect of Time: that is, as a system in ceaseless develop¬
ment, yet revealing a comprehensible structure which could be
defined in the triadic formula. The cosmos had a beginning and
an end; it had no beginning and no end; it contained and was

266 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

contained; it was stable and unstable, a form inside the flux and a
flux inside the form. These ideas appear in the magical and reli¬
gious texts; but they have a coherent and concrete aspect in the
thought of the alchemists which they lack elsewhere. For the
alchemists alone were trying to apply them in the exploration of
matter and its manifold changes.

Imagery similar to that surrounding Aion appeared in connec¬
tion with Hekate in the Chaldean Oracles. There as Zoe she pro¬
duces the life of blessed immortality; as Psyche she ensouls the
worlds; as Physis (Ananke , Necessity) she rules over the spheres;
as Heimarmene (Fate) she dominates the earth-zone. “Do not look
at Physic, for her name is determined by Destiny.” 19 She is also
a Girdler, encircling and holding all things together. This aspect
is brought out by the winding snakes on her statue. She is the
universe with her hairs visible “by the glaring terrifying light”
of the fiery snakes that symbolise the spheres. She is also a girdler
as representing the Zone of Dreams; for dreams are brought by
daimons of the moon or the aerial sphere. She is the mistress of
the daimons and thus is the dream-sender. Her girdle stands for
the limit of the aitherial and the sublunar worlds; in each of those
worlds her ensouling power works differently, for one world is
seen as composed of regular motion, the other of the conflicting
powers of spirit and matter. Psyche comes in here as the ensouling
principle. Created directly by the Father, without mother of other
intermediary, she “ensouls the All with her warmth”. In a way

41. Ouroboros: St Mark’s MS 299 fi88v

KLEOPATRA 2<1 7

we can refer these images back to the Timaios with its idea of
“evil encircling material nature and our earthly dwelling-place
with necessity”. 30

Ideas about the Ouroboros found their way into the literary
world e. <*., in Artemidoros and Macrobius. The former, in his
dream-book, remarks that “the dragon also signifies Time because
it is long and undulant”. The latter declares the two-headed
Roman god Janus is the world:

that is, the heavens, and his name Janus comes from eundo [by going]
since the world always goes rolling on itself in its globe-form . . . So
the Phoenicians have represented it in their temples as a dragon curled
in a circle and devouring its tail, to denote the way in which the world

feeds on itself and returns on itself. ...

It is also clear that it’s the Sun honoured under the name of Mercurms
[Hermes] according to the caduceus that the Egyptians have con¬
secrated to the god in the figure of Two Serpents, male and female,
interlaced. Their upper extremities bend round together, and, embrac¬
ing one another, form a circle, while the tails, after forming a knot,
come together at the haft of the caduceus and are provided with wings
that start off at this point. 21

Even more interesting is the passage that ends the second book
of Claudian’s poem, On the Consulship of Stilicho. Claudian came
from Egypt and his imagery shows the Egyptian idea of the night-
journey of the sun through a cave or tunnel in the earth. But the
introduction of the Ouroboros in association with Natura
(Physic), the various metals, and the Aged Seer strongly suggests
one of the alchemic visions of revelation or initiation:

Far off, unknown, beyond the range of thought,

scarce reached by gods, the years’ rough haggard mother,

stands a primeval Cave in whose vast breast

is Time’s cradle and tomb. A Serpent encloses

the Cave, consuming all things with slow power

and green scales always glinting. Its mouth devours

the backbent tail as with mute motion it traces

its beginning. At the entrance Nature sits,

the threshold-guardian, aged and yet lovely,

and round her gather and flit on every side

Spirits. A Venerable Man writes down

immutable laws. He fixes the number of stars

in every constellation, makes some of them move

and others hang at rest. So all things live

or die by predetermined laws . . .

268 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

When the Sun rested on the cave’s wide threshold.

Nature ran in her might to meet him; the Old Man bent

grey hairs to the proud rays. Of its own accord

the adamantine door swung open, revealing

the huge interior, displaying the House

the Secrets of Time. Here in appointed places

the Ages dwell, with varying Metals marking

their aspect. Those of brass are there upheaped,

there stiff the iron, there the silver gleaming;

shy of earth-contacts, in a distinguished section,

is set the flock of golden years. 22

The Sun chooses one of the richest substances to be marked
with Stilicho’s name; bids the rest follow him and addresses them
as they pass. “The consul is come for whom we have delayed an
Age of nobler ore. Something of a golden age is prophesied.
Then the Sun enters “his Garden starred with fiery dew, the
valley round which there runs a river of flame that feeds with
bounteous rays the dripping weeds on which the horses of the
sun crop pasturing”. As often with Claudian we find a genuinely
imaginative reconstruction of the ideas of his period in terms of
the contemporary situation: here, the need of the Empire to
find some way of transforming itself.

There is yet another source by which we may judge the ideas
held about the Ouroboros. Horapollon—his date is unclear, but
was probably 5 th century—attempted to explain in Greek the
meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, with a slight amount of genuine
knowledge and a great deal of the fantasies characteristic of his
age. His work is thus of much value in telling us what that age
made of various symbols. He gives the Ouroboros three main
meanings: Eternity, the Universe, Power or Dominance. First
the question of time:

To signify Eternity [Aion] they draw the Sun and Moon because they
are eternal elements. But when they want to represent Eternity
differently, they draw a Serpent with his tail hidden by the rest of the
body. This the Egyptians call Ouraion, but the Greeks a Basilisk. They
make it of Gold and set on the [heads of] Gods. [Eternity] because of
the three kinds of serpents this alone is immortal, the others being
mortal. Should it blow on any creatures, even without biting, the
victim dies. So, as it seems to have power of life and death, they put
it on the heads of the gods. 23

KLEOPATRA 2 ^9

The three kinds of snakes were ptjas, chersaia, and chelidoma ;
Galen says that the ptjas “spat poison into bodies with a good
aim”. Horapollon’s idea of it blowing may have some connec¬
tion with pneuma. But the uraeus (the cobra or asp) with which
the Egyptians crowned their gods, did not stand for eternity,
it had been worshipped from early times and was taken by the
dynastic Egyptians as a sign of sovereignty. The disk of Re (the
Sun) had a cobra coiled round it. However, an asp sacred to Isis
was called Thermouthis and came to be regarded as immortal in
Egypt; Ploutarch calls it unageing. 24 Kyrillos of Alexandreia,

42. Ouroboros: Paris MS 2225 f8a, stylised version

in his attack on Julian, says that the snake is the emblem of the
heavens because of its circular coil and that of time because it is
“long and many-spiralled”. Artemidoros in his Dream Book sees
the skin-sloughing serpent among other things as time. 25 The
symbolism was picked up again at the Renaissance. Marsilio
Ficino, translator of Plotinos, remarks in a gloss on a passage
declaring the hieroglyphs to be Platonic ideas made visible:
“Your thought of Time, for example, is manifold and mobile,
maintaining that Time is speedy and by a sort of revolution joins
the beginning to the end; it teaches prudence, produces much
and destroys it again. The Egyptians comprehend this whole
discourse in one stable image, painting a winged serpent that
holds its tail in its mouth.” 26

KLEOPATRA

27I

270 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Next the Ouroboros as the emblem of the universe. Hora-
pollon says:

Wishing to represent the cosmos, they draw a serpent devouring its
own tail, marked with variegated scales. By the scales they suggest
the stars in heaven. This beast is the heaviest of animals, as the earth
is the heaviest [of elements]. It is the smoothest, like water And as
each year it sheds its skin, it [represents] old age. But as each season
of the year successively returns, it grows young again. But the fact
that it uses its own body for food signifies that whatever things are
generated in this world by divine providence are received back into
it by diminution. 27

He is punning on geras, which means both “old age” and the
sloughed snake-skin”. Servius in his commentary on the Aeneid
says that the Phoenicians use the image of the snake curved in a
circle and devouring his own tail to represent the universe which
revolves out of itself and into itself. He adds that “The year was
indicated by the Egyptians before the invention of letters by the
drawing of a dragon biting its own tail: because it comes back
upon itself .” 28

Thirdly, the Ouroboros represents power or perfection :

To show a very powerful king, they draw a serpent represented as the
kosmos with its tail in its mouth and the name of the king written in
the midst of the coils, thus intimating that the king rules over the
kosmos. And the name of the serpent among the Egyptians is Meisi.

To show the king as guardian in another way, they draw the serpent
m a state of watchfulness. And instead of the name of the king they
draw a guard. For he is the guardian of the whole world.

Again when they consider the king to be a cosmic ruler and wish
to represent this, they draw the serpent and in the middle they represent
a great palace. And reasonably, for the place of the king’s palace is the
kosmos.

When they want to symbolise the king ruling not the whole world
but a part of it, they draw a serpent cut in half.

They symbolise the Pantokrator by the perfect animal, again drawing
a complete serpent. Thus among them that which pervades the whole
cosmos is Vneuma.^

The development of absolute monarchies in the Greek world
after Alexander, who in various ways made claims to divine
honours, led in turn to an increase in henotheistic tendencies in
religion. Especially after the later Stoics produced apologetics
for the kingship, with the centralised State supposed to reflect

43. Aion: nude lionheaded figure on globe, serpent entwining thrice
with head over skull and about to enter mouth (sketched by Bartoll
from account of Mithraeum found in Rome in 16th century); and statu ®
from Mithraeum at Ostia, serpent entwining six times with head
resting on skull; wings with symbols of seasons on back; hands hold
keys and sceptre; thunderbolt engraved on breast; at base, hammer and
tongs of Vulcan-Hephaistos, pine and cock of Aesculapius-Asklepios
(? or Sun and Attis), and caduceus of Mercury-Hermes.

the divine guidance of the cosmos, the earthly and the heavenly
ruler became ever more entangled; ideas and practices in politics
affected ideas and practices in religion, and vice versa. The old
notion of a King as necessarily Lord of the Cosmos was revived
on a new level. With the Roman Empire the notion of an Al¬
mighty on earth and in heaven inevitably grew stronger. I here

272 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

will be a Kosmokrator and all things will be subjected to him,”
said the astrologer Hephaistion. From Caracalla on, Kosmokrator,
Ruler of the Universe, became a term for the Roman Emperor.

The symbol of the snake with tail in mouth attracted also the
Gnostics and writers of apocrypha. In the Pistis Sophia we read,
“Outer darkness is a huge dragon with its tail in its mouth; it is
outside the world and surrounds it completely .” 30 The serpent
here has connections, however, with Leviathan the dragon of the
Old Testament, which must be annihilated before the lower
world can be redeemed . 31 That dragon, depicted also in the
Ophite diagram described by Origen, appears again in the Acts of
the Apostle Thomas , “I am the offspring of the serpent nature,” the
son of him “who encircles the sphere” and who “is around the
ocean, whose tail lies in his mouth”. The same Acts has the Song
of the Apostle Judas Thomas in the Land of the Indians, com¬
monly called the Hymn of the Pearl; there the desired Pearl lies
“in the middle of the Sea which is encircled by the snorting ser¬
pent”. The quest for the Pearl symbolises the saviour’s descent
into matter in search of the soul. In the Jewish Acts of Kjriakos
and Iulitta the hero in his travels meets a dragon, “king of the
worms of the earth, whose tail lies in his mouth . . . the serpent
that led astray the first Adam.”

Another passage in the Pistis Sophia depicts the dragon dif¬
ferently , 32 as the supreme sun-god: “But the disk of the sun was
a great dragon, with its tail in its mouth, which ascended to
seven powers of the left and was drawn by four powers in the
shape of white horses.” The Pistis has been taken as the work of
Syrian sects known as Barbelo-Gnostics, but the original text is
in Koptic (Sahidic); and here we see a strong Egyptian image.
Macrobius in his Saturnalia compares the setting and rising of the
sun to the sloughing of the snake-skin, and ascribes the origin of
the symbol to the Phoenicians . 33

The serpent biting his tail was worshipped at Hierapolis in
Phrygia; also by the Naasenes. The Gnostic Ophites worshipped
the snake; and Ophiouchos, both a man and a constellation,
played the main role in the mythology of the Perates, a sect of the
Ophites, snake-worshippers. Ophiouchos, snake-masterer—the
author of Philosophoumena compared the Logos, Christ, with him . 34
The Ophites declared, “We venerate the Serpent because God has
made it the cause of gnosis for mankind. Ialdabaoth wanted men to
have no recollection of the Mother or of the Father on high. The

KLEOPATRA 2 7 3

Serpent, by tempting them, brought them gnosis and taught the
man and woman the complete knowledge of the mysteries from
on high. That is why [its] father Ialdabaoth, mad with fury, cast
it down from the heavens.” They argued, “Our bowels, thanks to
which we nourish ourselves and live, do they not reproduce t le

form of the serpent ?” 35 _ 1 ..

The primeval serpent existed all over the Near East as well as
in Egypt. It is, however, in ancient Egypt that we find the clearest
antecedents of the alchemic ouroboros. There the cosmic serpent
appears as Sito, who is shown with many coils or with tail in
mouth. In the Book of the Dead, chapter lxxxvii, the sloughing
motive is used, “I am Sito dilated with years, I die and am reborn
daily. I am Sito dwelling in the farthest regions of the world.

As Scribe of the Divine Book, the serpent has his link with
Thoth-Hermes . 37 Amun also was identified with a serpent
creator, and of the Ogdoad, the eight cosmic deities at Hermo-
polis, four (female) are shown with snake-heads . 38 A hymn from
the Coffin Texts shows that the creative word was uttered by the
coiled serpent. “I bent right round myself. I was encircled in my
coils, one who made a place for himself in the midst of the coils.
His utterance was what came forth from his own mouth. At the
end of time. The Book of the Dead says, the world will revert to its
primary state, and Atum, or Re, will again become a serpent . 39

In the inner coffin of Zepi the tail-eater is represented as symbol
of the cosmic ocean surrounding the world; and in the innermost
shrine of Tutankhamen a mummy-like figure is ringed above
and below by two encircling serpents, those of sky and earth.
We also find a few representations of Osiris bent right round,
head to feet, encircling the Tuat or Underworld. A long snake
surrounds the Sun god in his boat; the solar eye appears enclosed
in oval (cosmic) waters; and the night-sun is depicted encircled
by a five-headed snake. Osiris, transformed into a serpent, takes
again the form of the primordial abyss.

Relevant too are the ancient representations of the cosmos as

44. The Consort of the Sky-goddess in his circular form

KLEOPATRA

275

274 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

Nut standing on the earth and bent right round, supporting
herself on her hands: her elongated middle as the sky. Under her
Geb lies flat. These two figures, female and male, enclose all
things. To bring the point out, Geb is shown touching Nut’s
hands with his toes and reaching out to touch her toes with his
fingers. Once he appears as a snake. In another design, between
him and Nut, is a snake biting its tail to repeat the pattern of
enclosing earth-sky. 41 The twisted-back posture that Geb at
times assumes is connected with the acrobatic dance, which 1
have elsewhere shown to be a ritual dance of life and death. It is
especially linked with death, and the circular twist-back of
the body must have something of the sense of completion, of
merged ends and beginnings, which emerges in the Ouroboros.
Though this death-birth dance was very ancient, its significance
was still strong in the minds of men who were interested in sym¬
bolism; for its imagery pervades the Dionjsiaka of Nonnos of
Panopolis in the 5th century a.d. 42

A small point: the star-scales of the cosmic serpent have their
anticipation in what seem pholides, scales or beast-dapplings, on
the body of Nut, of Hathor the sky-cow, or of the serpent.
Ailian remarks, “I hear the Kings of Egypt wear speckled asps
on their diadems.” 43

Inevitably the serpent as the cosmic encircler, as Okeanos, at
times was confused with, or merged into, the serpent as the enemy.
In alchemic myth he was seen then as a guardian of the secret that
had to be gained, the initiation-monster that had to be slain or
outwitted. After the design of the dragon with three ears and
four feet we read, “The dragon is the guardian of the temple.
Sacrifice him, skin him, separate the flesh from the bones, and
you will find what you seek.” 44 Then appears the man of brass
who changes colour and becomes the man of silver, who in turn
becomes the man of gold. The destruction of the serpent reminds
us of the ancient Egyptian ritual for demolishing Apepi, who
sought to swallow the sun. Only by continually breaking Apepi
up could the course of the sun be kept safe and the daily rising
assured. 45

In a passage in Stephanos, as in later alchemy in general, the
serpent in his annihilations seems to represent the moment of
putrefaction.

As for the field, know that it has many unprofitable farmers, and
unless you cast these out you’ll get no profit from the field. There

are all the Six Brothers [metals] attendant on klaudianos and the others
together. Except for the 2 useful ones, they are not One. And all the
leukargenos [not known elsewhere] is useless. For the field has a Serpent
and he dries up the place with his breath, where also men grow
enfeebled. And I saw him and the spotted scales of his body. The
beginning of his tail was white as milk, but his belly and back were
saffron-hued and his head was greenish-black. You should divide the
field into 3, the 4 brothers one part and the great stone one part, or
thus the ancients sought to do with the field, as I found out. For so
does Theodoros the Magistrianos, and so Iakobos the lapidary

Klaudianos occurs eleven times in the alchemic corpus; it has been
interpreted as a copper-lead alloy perhaps plus some zinc equi¬
valent to aes Claudianum . 47 But this is dubious; it is ranked wit
minerals rather than metals. The description of the colours of
parts of the dragon are found in two anonymous fragments ot
uncertain date. 48 In the poem by Theophrastos the serpent is both
Ouroboros and the moment of whitening:

A Dragon springs from that. For twenty days
exposed in horse-dung, he’ll devour his tail
till nothing is left of it. This Dragon s name
is Ouroboros. He is white to see,
his skin is spotted, and his form and shape
are very strange. At birth he was produced
out of the warm wet substance of mated things.

The close embrace of male and female kind,
a union clasped and working in the sea,
brought forth this Dragon, as I said, a Monster
blasting all earth with flames. With all his might
and armour shown, he swims until he reaches
a site within the currents of the Nile.

His glistening skin and his engirdling bands
are bright as gold and shine with points of light.

Then sieze and slay with skilful art this Dragon
there in the sea, and quickly wield your knife
two-edged with hot and moist. And when you’ve cleft
his carcass through, lift out the gall and take
its blackened form that’s heavy with earthy bile.

From it ascend great clouds of steaming mist,
which, when they’ve risen dense enough, can bear
the Dragon from the sea and lift him up
to a warm station. The air’s moisture upholds
his lightened shape and form. Be cautious then.

277

276 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Don’t burn his substance. Rather change its nature
with quenching draughts. Pour out the mercury
into a gaping urn; and when its stream
of sacred fluid ceases flowing, wash
the blackened dross of earth away with care.

So, when you’ve brightened what the darkness hid,
inside the Dragon’s entrails, you will bring
an unspeakable mystery to light. For there,
extremely bright and lucid, it will shine,
and, tinged throughout with perfect white, will stand
revealed with marvellous brilliancy—its blackness
changed utterly to white. When cloud-sent water
flows there, it cleanses each dark and earthy stain.

Thus easily he frees himself by drinking
nectar, though he’s quite dead; and all his wealth
he outpours for mortals. Abundantly the earthborn
are sustained in life when they have found at last
the wonderful mystery, which, being fixed,
will turn to silver, dazzling-bright in kind,
a metal purified of earthly taint,
so shining, clear, and marvellously white.

45. Aion, relief in white marble (found in same Mithraeum as no. 43a);
naked to waist, then wide trousers; extended arms hold torches; four
wings from back, two pointing up, two down, with serpent round each.
Circular burning altar with god’s breath, pneuma, connected

KLEOPATRA

Theophrastos described also the stage of yellowing as a killing
of the dragon. Now liquid mercury can be dispensed wnth on y
heat is needed. The knife of fire replaces the double-edged km

Then seize again the Dragon changed to white
(a change divinely achieved, as I have told,
by means of whitening twice performed). Again
kill him with a knife of fire, draw all his blood
which gushes blazing-hot and red as flame
glittering as it ignites. Then dip his skin
into the blood that spurted from the wound
deep in his belly (as you would dip in dye _
of murex-purple a whitened robe). You’ll gain
a shining glory lustrous as the sun,
of noble form and gladdening the heart
of mortals who behold its excellence. 49

The whitened metal is melted over a fire, preparatory to the
addition of the Stone of powder of projection. Drawing off
melted metal is here described as drawing out the blood of
the dragon, and stirring in the powder as dipping the skin in
blood. In the alchemic lexicon mercury is the Seed or thereof
the Dragon as well as the Milk of a Black Cow, Water of Silver,

Water of the Moon, River Water, Dew.-' 0

It is perhaps not irrelevant to end this section with a reminder
of the important part played by the Ouroboros-image in a great

chemical discovery. Friedrich Kekule in 1865 ^"oformulate
snake seizing hold of its own tail and was thus led to formulate

279

Womb Furnace and Vase

W e have noted some examples of imagery from mating, gestation
and birth in alchemy. Now we had better look at the extent to
which such ideas penetrated ancient culture. The division of ores
and metals, stones and precious stones into male and female was
very ancient. The Mesopotamians had made it, using shape,
colour and brilliance as criteria. An Assyrian text spoke of “the
musa stone, male [in shape] and the copper stone, female [in
shape]”. The male stones were thought to be those with a more
vivid colour; the female ones were the paler. The ancient ono-
mastica and recipes recognise male and female forms of various
minerals or chemicals; the male here being in general the harder
or darker modification or characterised by some sort of structure
that suggested maleness . 1 Stones were thought to have their own
force or magical powers; they were thought also to grow like
organisms, though more slowly, and at times to produce their
young.

In Babylonian ritual texts we find a sexual division of salts and
ores; and the general outlook survived into the medieval world
in alchemic writings and in lapidaries . 2 Syrian alchemical works
speak of female magnesium; the lapis judaicus was male or female . 3
In dealing with stibnite (a common antimony sulphur, brittle
with a metallic gloss like galena) Plinius writes, “In the same
silvermines is found what we might best describe as petrified
foam, white and shining, but not transparent. It is variously
called stimmi, stibi, alabastrum and larbasis. There are two varieties,
male and female, of which the female is considered the better.
The male is coarser, rougher, less dense. Its surface is not broken
and it contains more grit. The female on the other hand glistens
and is easily broken, showing a lengthways cleavage instead of
crumbling into small lumps.” Dioskorides makes the same dis¬
tinction. In ancient Egypt the Ebers papyrus mentions stimmi ,

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE

and speaks of true and male stibnite no less than thirty-six times.
Again Plinius tells of the male and female sandastros (possibly
aventurine quartz):

golden particles that shine like stars within the stone, always within
its structure and never upon its surface. More, there is always a
religious aspect declaring their affinity with the stars, because the
embellishing starry particles generally conform in number and arrange¬
ment to the Pleiades and Hyades, They are therefore regarded by
astrologers as caerimoniae [ritual objects]. 5

Plinius further respects the belief of Theophrastos and Mucianus
that certain stones had offspring. Theophrastos in On Stones states
that some have the power “to act on other substances or to react
to them and to fail so to react. For instance, some stones can be
melted while others cannot be, some are combustible, while
others are not, and so forth. More, in the very process of combus¬
tion or rather of exposure to fire, stones exhibit many differences.
Again, some stones, the smaragdus for example, have the power of
communicating their colour to water, and others that of completely
petrifying objects placed in them. Some have a power of attraction,
and others of testing gold and silver, like the so-called Herakleian
and Lydian stones. But the greatest and most remarkable power,
if it be true, is that possessed by the stones that bring forth other
stones .” 6 Futher he makes such remarks as: “the stone known as
sapphieros, which is black and does not differ greatly from the male
kind of kyanos.” And dealing with the lyngourion (which was
thought to be made of lynx-urine) he says that the urine of the
male lynx produces a better (probably darker) stone than that of
the female. Plinius tells us:

The paeanis [Apollo Stone], otherwise known as gaeanis [earthstone] is
said to become pregnant and give birth to another stone. It is therefore
considered to relieve labour pains. Its birthplace is in Macedonia, near
the Tomb of Teiresias, and it looks like ice. 7

The name-link with Apollo and the place-link with Teiresias
suggest also some mantic connection.

We find the sexual differentiation of ores also in Africa, e.g.
among the Kitara, who consider as male the hard black stones
found on the surface, as female the soft red ones from down inside
the mine—that is, deep inside mother earth. The mingling of the
two kinds of stone is needed for fruitful fusion in metallurgy.

280 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

In ancient China, Yu the Great, the primeval smelter, could tell
male from female metals; and he saw a parallel between his
boilers and the cosmic forces of yang andj/a, which also had a
sexual basis. 8 A common instance of sexual differentiation all over
the world is provided in firemaking rites, where the hard male
stick is rubbed or twirled into the softer female stick, which at
last bursts into flame. Nonnos applies the distinction to fire¬
making stones:

As the female stone is struck by the male stone,
one stone on another brings flame to birth as crusht
and beaten it loosens a shower of sparks from itself,
so the heavenly fire is kindled in clouds and murk
crusht and beaten, but from earthy smoke,
thin by nature, the winds are brought forth.

There’s another floating vapour drawn from the waters,
which the sun, shining full upon them, milks out
and draws up dewily through boiling tracks of air;
this thickens and produces the cloudy veil ... 9

and ends by coming down as rainwater. Here we have the two
vapours of Aristotle, but Nonnos adds an alchemic touch with
his idea of boiling air. The Dyaks, we may note, call a heavy fall
of rain male. The Book of Enoch divides the cosmic waters: “The
upper water will fill the role of man, the lower that of woman.”
And the Zohar says that a well fed by a stream symbolises the
union of man and woman, 10

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE 281

Trees and plants were more naturally given sexes. Nonnos has
the male and female palm-trees pledging love. Artificial fertilisa¬
tion and the grafting of date and fig-trees had long been known in
Mesopotamia; at least two paragraphs of Hammurabi’s Code
deal with the practices. The latter were seen as a ritual. Maimo-
mides says that Jews were forbidden to use lemons from grafted
trees so as to prevent them from being drawn into orgiastic
activities of the neighbouring peoples. Ibn Washya, whom he
cites, speaks of graftings “contrary to nature” of lemon-bough on
to laurel or olive, and declares that the graft only succeeds if it is
done ritually and during certain conjunctions of the sun and
moon. A very beautiful maiden must hold the bough while a
man from behind has anal intercourse with her; and while he is
thus enjoying her, the girl grafts the branch on the tree. Thus the
human act of intercourse ensures the marriage of two different
trees. 11 The Mesopotamians classified vegetable species as male
and female, concerned especially with any likeness to the genitals
and with the role of the plant in magical operations. Cypress and
mandragora were male; the shrub nikibtu (liquid-amber orientalis)
was male or female according to the form or the ritual role.
Sanskrit terminology shows the close comparison of plant-forms
with male and female genitals; and Caraka, in Kalpasthana, writes
of the sexuality of plants. 12 The Jewish exegete, Bahya ben Asher
(died 1340) stated that male and female distinctions were found,
not only in plants, but in all vegetable species and also in minerals. 13

The same general application of the principle can be found in
ancient Greece and Rome, even if there was never any attempt at
systematic development. The Perates said of the sea that it was
male and female; and Horapollon tells us obscurely, “To symbolise
Hephaistos they [the Egyptians] draw a beetle [scarab] and a
vulture; and Athene, a vulture and a beetle. For the universe
seems to them to be composed of the male and the female. And
they draw a vulture in place of Athene; for only these gods among
them are hermaphroditic.” 14 In fact there was a strong herma¬
phroditic element in early Egyptian religion, since there was a
general idea of the creator-god as needing both sexes inside
himself. We can find the same traces in Greek religion. Ploutarch
cites for his day a confused version of Egyptian cosmogonic
images:

Apis, they say is the animated image of Osiris; and he is conceived
when a generative light falls strongly from the Moon and touches a

282 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

cow that is in heat; for which reason many of the decorations of Apis
resemble the appearances of the Moon. Thus, he blackens over his
shining parts with dusky robes, since it is on the new moon of the
month Phamenoth that they hold the festival they call the Entry of
Osiris into the Moon—which marks the beginning of spring. So thev
place the power of Osiris in the Moon and say that Isis, as the cause of
his birth, is also his wife. Therefore they call the Moon the Mother
of Kronos and hold that she is of hermaphroditic nature, as she is filled
and impregnated by the Sun, and again she emits and disseminates in
the air generative principles; for she does not always express the
mischief wrought by Typhon [Seth], but, being later conquered by the
birth and bound by it, she all the same emerges again and fights her
way through to Horos—this latter being the universe that surrounds
the earth and us not wholly exempt either from generation or
destruction. 15

In Horapollon’s statement Hephaistos would stand for Ptah, and
Athene for his consort Neith. On a Ptolemaic ring the ideogram
of the scarab completes the writing of the name Ptah; and the
Theban cosmogony of that period told how an Egg fell from the
heavens and out of the Egg came Ptah-Tanen in the form of a
serpent with scarab-head. 16 Seneca also reports that:

The Egyptians recognise four elements, then they divide each into
male and female. The male air is the wind, the female air is that which
is hazy and stagnant. The water of the sea is male, all the other waters
are female. In fire the part that burns and devours is male; the luminous
and harmless part is female. Finally they call male earth the rocks and
stones which own more strength, and the female earth that which
lends itself to cultivation. 17

The idea of a male-female deity was buried deep in early Greek
thought, but it was pushed out by the strong sense of male
dominance that appears in the Olympian system. It was reborn as
a philosophic idea in the 5 th century, if we may judge by the lines
of Aischylos that speak of Zeus as both the rain out of heaven and
as the fecundated earth. Aristotle sees male and female as the
mimemata , copies, of the formal and material principles at work in
all things. 18 But it was with the growth of Stoic ideas and the
reformulation of Pythagorean doctrines in the later 4th and the
3rd centuries that the concept of a male-female principle seems to
develop strongly. Iamblichos thus describes Pythagorean posi¬
tions that probably date from that period:

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE 283

The Pythagoreans call the Monas not only God but also Intelligence

and Male-and-Female _In so far as it is, in a general way, the seed of

all things, they define the Monad as both male and female, not only
because they regard the Odd as male as being divisible with difficulty,
the Even as female because easily divisible, and the Monad alone (or
on its own) is both Odd and Even— but also because it is conceived
as father and mother, possessing logos of matter and of form, of worker
and thing worked-on.

And indeed it is able to produce the Dyad because it is moved by a
double motion; for it is easy for the worker to draw the material to
himself or the material on its side to draw the worker. As for the speed,
which, for what it is of itself, is able, once sown, to produce both
females and males, it presents in an indivisible manner the nature of
the two up to a certain point in its development. Only when it begins
to become the fruit or animal of plant does it henceforth admit of
separation and differentiation in one direction or the other; for it has
passed from potentiality into actuality. On the other side, if there is
in the Monad the possibility of all number, the Monad should be an
intelligible number [i.e. a number purely thought or abstract] in the
correct sense, for it does not yet manifest any actually realised number
—all numbers being together in it in a purely conceptual manner.

Besides, according to a certain way of defining things, they call
matter also Universal Receptacle in so far as it is not only able to produce
the Dyad, which is matter in the true sense, but it is also the receptacle
of all the seminal logoi, if it is correct at least that it is the universal
purveyor and dispenser. In the same way they call it Chaos, namely
the Firstborn Chaos of Hesiod from which everything else comes as
from the Monad. Finally the Monad is conceived as Confusion and
Mixture, Absence of Light and Obscurity, since all that will later emerge
is still in it without differentiation or distinction. 19

Iamblichos here is largely paraphrasing the work of Nikomachos
of Gerasa of the 2nd century a.d.

In an Orphic hymn that goes back at least to the 2nd or early
1 st century b.c. we meet the line: “Zeus becomes Male, immortal
Zeus becomes Bride.” Valerius Soranus, cited by Varro, imitated
the verse in Latin. There is perhaps Stoic influence here; for
Diogenes of Babylon, about 240-152 b.c., wrote a Stoic type of
allegory in which Zeus is represented as all things, all gods, and
so both male and female. Chrysippos in the 3rd century b.c.
had called Zeus Aither “both Father and Son”. 20

There thus seem converging Pythagorean and Stoic ideas on
the creative principle as male-female. Perhaps some eastern or
Egyptian influences played a part in the development; but the

284 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

ideas can be explained well enough as originating out of the Greek
systems. They are of interest here as providing one of the philo¬
sophic bases from which the alchemic idea of the unitary process
with its inner dialectic was built up . 21 The Chaldean Oracles see
the Mother in the Father, and speak of the world-forming Ideas
that “move about the terrible Wombs like bees”. These Wombs
are in the Cosmic Body. The same sort of imagery however goes
far back, for Diogenes Laertes tells us of Leukippos that the
heavier atoms in their winnowing whirl form a primary spherical
system. “This parts like a hymen, enclosing within it atoms of all
kinds; and as these are whirled through the centre’s resistance,
the enclosing hymen becomes thinner . ..” Hymen was used for
a thin skin or enclosing caul, membrane; its link with sexual and
generative functions appears in the fact of the marriage-god
being called Hymen . 22

The sexual classification of opposed forces or principles entered
also into astrology. Ptolemaios says:

Since there are two primary kinds of natures, male and female, and of

the forces already mentioned that of the moist is especially female_

for as a general thing this element is present to a greater degree in all
females, and the others rather in males—with good reason the opinion
has been handed down to us that the Moon and Aphrodite are female,
and that the Sun, Kronos, Zeus and Ares are male, and Hermes com¬
mon to both genders, inasmuch as he produces dry and moist alike.

They state too the stars turn male or female according to their
aspect to Sun. When they are morning stars and precede the Sun, they
turn male, and female when they are evening stars and follow the sun.
More, this happens also according to their positions with regard to
the horizon; for when they are in positions from the orient to mid¬
heaven, or again from the Occident to the lower midheaven, they turn
male because they are eastern, but in the other two quadrants, as western
stars, they turn female.

Likewise, since, of the two most obvious internals making up Time,
the day is more male because of its heat and active force, and night more
female because of its moisture and gift of rest, the tradition has come
down that the Moon and Aphrodite are nocturnal, the Sun and Zeus
diurnal, and Hermes common as before—diurnal when a morning
star and nocturnal as an evening star . 23

He adds that six of the zodiacal signs were taken as male or diurnal,
six as female or nocturnal.

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE 285

The Hermetic writings carried on the theme. The Poimandrcs
assigns to the Primal Man the Narcissus-myth: he saw his own
reflection in the Water and wished to inhabit the sphere of nature.
“Then Nature, having received into herself her beloved, embraced
him whole, and they mated [mixed],for they were filled with love.”
So man alone on earth is double, mortal and immortal. “Though
in effect immortal and owning power over all things, he submits
to the conditions of mortals, subject as he is to Fate. Lienee,
though above the composite framework [of the spheres] he is
also the slave of it, male-female as come from a male-female
father, and exempt from sleep as come from a sleepless father, yet
conquered [by love and sleep ].” 24 Note that the father-bias is
now so strong in thought that even when speaking of an herma¬
phroditic being, the writer calls him a father. St Ephraim in his
refutations of Mani writes:

“Darkness, in effect,” he says, “has loved Light,” its contrary; and
how should water love fire that absorbs it? or fire the water that puts
it out? and how should fire love light? what use, I ask you, does it
draw from it? For fire, indeed, loves fire and wind loves wind and
water loves water. Or is it indeed that the nature of Darkness is male
and that coming from the good, female? Otherwise what is the sense
of all that: that they loved one another ? 25

One of the Gnostic texts found at Chernoboskion thus explains
the mystery of unity as two in one:

If you would see the fulfilment of this mystery and the image of this
miracle, consider the way in which bodily union is affected by the male
with the woman. When the male attains to the supreme moment and
the seed springs forth, at that moment the woman receives the strength
of the male and the male receives the strength of the woman. ... It
is because of this that the mystery of the bodily union is practised in
secret so that the conjunction of natures should not be degraded
through being seen by the multitude who would despise that work.

Here is the sort of reason that the alchemist would give for his
secrecy. The writer continues with an interesting development
of the idea of the unity of above-below. “Do you know, Askle-
pios, that Egypt is the image of heaven, or, better still, the dwel¬
ling of heaven and of all the powers that are in heaven . .. Our
earth is the temple of the universe.” A magical papyrus cries,
“Open the holy temple, the cosmos founded on the earth!”

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE

286 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

And another expands the theme in a spell for opening doors by
means of Aion’s name:

Open, open, four regions of the world, for the Lord of the inhabited
earth is coming out! Joy for the archangels of the dekans, the angels!
For he himself, the Aion of the Aions, the unique, the one over all
things, traverses the place invisible. Open, door, listen, bolt, split in
two, lock, at the name Ala! Sent out. Earth, from yourself, for your
master, all that you contain! For it is he himself, he who launches the
storm, he who holds back the frost, the Ruler of fire. Open, it’s
Acheboukrom who bids you. 27

287

y OU —you. Tat, Asklepios and Ammon—will be accounted as
vanity. The physical universe will break down in disorder, in
“atheism, dishonour, and unreason”, as the three seals of the
world’s old age. Then a calamity will prelude the restoration of
tilings, when the gods “will be re-established in a town that will
lie on the borders of Egypt”. As usual in “prophecies”, what has
happened in the past or is happening in the present is attributed
to the future, so that it will seem a dead prophet has foreseen the
whole thing. Note the suggestion that a counter-movement will
arise, located in some southern centre. The gnostic author is
filled with a pagan nationalism.

With such a universal application of the sexual principle it
will not surprise that even geometry comes into the scheme.
Ploutarch says:

Now the better and more divine nature is made up of Three: the
Intelligible, Matter, and That Formed of these Two, which the Greeks
denominate Cosmos. Plato called the Intelligible “Idea, Model,
Father”, and Matter he terms “Mother, Nurse”, the seat and receptacle
of generation; and that which results from the pair he is used to call
“Issue, Birth”. We may conjecture that the Egyptians [revere] the
most beautiful kind of Triangle [the right-angled], since they compare
it with the nature of the cosmos and Plato seems to use this figure in
his Republic when drawing up his marriage-scheme.

The Triangle too has this property: 3 the right angle, 4 the base, 5
the hypotenuse, being of equal value with the lines containing it. We
must therefore compare the line forming the right angle to the male,
then base to the female, the hypotenuse to the child of the two—the

The Chernoboskion text goes on to draw the conclusion that as
Egypt’ image of heaven, is now conquered and oppressed
(by the Romans and the Christians), so the harmonious and stabi¬
lising relation of below-and-above is disturbed and the whole
universe about to collapse. The day is coming, it says, when all
divinity will leave Egypt for heaven because “the foreigners
will invade Egypt and dominate her”. The Egyptians will be
prevented from worship and will be tortured; the country will
be filled with tombs, not temples, “and you, O river [Nile], a day
will come when you will overflow with blood instead of water,
and when the bodies of the dead will be piled higher than your
banks.” Men will weep more for the living than for the dead, left
with nothing but their language. Then, “all that I have taught

48. Sky-goddess bent over to encircle, in double form, her back-bending

circular husband

288 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

one as Osiris, Final Cause; the second, as Isis, the recipient; the third,
as Horos, the result. As for 3, the first, it is uneven and perfect; 4, a
square with a perfect side, is the product of 2; 5 pardy resembles the
father, pardy the mother, being made up of 3 and 2. Also the All
derives its name from 5 [panta,petite], and to reckon is called “counting
by fives”, for 5 produces, when squared, the same number as that of
the letters of the Egyptian alphabet and also the number of years that
Apis lived. 28

The logical result of the sexualisation of all forces and energies
acting on one another is to see the cosmos as made up of male and
female genitalia operating inside a womb which is thus fertilised,
and to go on to the vision of the whole cosmos itself as a great
womb enclosing all the lesser centres of fertilisation. The Sethians
imagined the entire heaven and earth as a pregnant womb, with
the naval in the middle. They said, “Let anyone examine the belly
of any being soever when it is pregnant, and they will find there
the imprint of heaven, earth, and all that’s situated immovably
in the middle. The first principle to be born was a violent wind,
come out of the water and causing all vegetation; the surging of
stirred waters was similar to the rhythmic spasms of the womb
to bring forth its offspring at the time of completion; the whistling
wind was like the Serpent with his hisses. Thus generation began
from the Serpent; when the Light and the Spirit from above met
with the dark chaotic Matter, the Serpent (Wind out of the Waters
of the Abyss) penetrated the latter and begot Man. As the Serpent
was the only form known and loved by the impure Womb, the
Logos of the Light had to take on that form in order to copulate
with Matter. The Logos descended into the body of a Virgin
and relieved the anguish prevailing in the Darkness. After enter¬
ing into the Womb, he purified himself and drank the Cup of
Living Water that alone could redeem and transform the servile
form of the body into a heavenly garment.

We see how close such a doctrine was to that set out by
Kleopatra, and yet how different. Here the horror and fear of
earthly life dominates, and the elixir, the pharmakon of life, the
cup of living water, is desired only as a means of escape into
another sphere; with Kleopatra the pharmakon was wanted as
the redemption of life here and now, the transformation of life
here and now. And it was sought, not by magical and sacra¬
mental means, but by scientific procedures, by the actual handling
and changing of matter, of material conditions.

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE 289

Now let us look at some alchemic formulations. We are told that
the male rises east, the female sets west, and the work is accom¬
plished by their union. The Earth is often defined as the Virgin
that has to be impregnated. “The Earth is virgin and bloody,
igneous and charnel.” “Virgin the earth will be found in the vagina
of the virgin.” Stephanos in his fourth lecture cried, “Fight
copper! Fight silver! Mate male and female! The copper in his
contest with silver is destroyed; the silver by her combination
with copper is fixed .” 29 A passage in Ibn Umail attributes to Hermes
an elaborate working-out of the analogy between the processes
of gestation and those of transmuting:

Hermes said. Know that the Secret of everything and'the Life of
everything is Water, and this Water is susceptible of treatment from
men and others, and in the Water is a great secret. This is the Water
which becomes Ferment in Wheat; Wine in the Vine; Olive Oil in
the Olive; Resin in the Turpentine-tree; Oil in the Sesame, the different
kinds of Fruits in all the Trees.

The beginning of the Child is from the Water, because when the
seed of man falls into the womb of the woman, the womb is locked
behind it for 7 days. The seed, when it falls into the womb, becomes a
Subtle Water, and it remains in the womb for 7 days till it penetrates
into all the limbs of the woman through its fluidity and subtleness.
Then it passes over the flesh and becomes flesh, and over the bones and
becomes bones, and over the hairs and nerves [or tendons] and becomes
like them; and so on with all parts of the limbs. Then it grows hardened
on the 8th day, and becomes like curds. Then on the 16th day it turns
red, its colour like that of flesh. Then on the 24th day, it becomes
manifest with its limbs distinguishable like hair. Then on 32nd day it
takes shape and becomes a human being.

He says in the Book: “Then we produced him by another creation.”

On the 40th day the Soul [Breath] becomes manifest and apparent
in it. Then from the 40th day blood begins to flow into the Embryo
through its navel and becomes its food. Then the Soul, by reason of
the blood, becomes visible and interlaces with the body and begins
to grow little by little and becomes strong. Know that Water serves
the Embryo in the Womb for the first three months. Then the Air
serves it for the second three months. Then for the third three months
Fire serves it. Fire makes it undergo coction and perfects it. When nine
months are completed for it, the blood which used to give it sustenance
through the navel, stops, and rises to the woman s breasts, becomes
there like snow, and is turned there into food for it, after its emergence
from the womb to this Middle World.

All these are [descriptions of] the manipulation of their Stone; and

291

290 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

in this way they manipulate it. Then understand this manipulation
and these meanings.

By the Womb is meant the interior of the Pot and those things that
are in the Pot. Its mouth has been closed and shut up so that it [the
product] may be collected in the mouth and will not find any exit into
the air. Then it will be coagulated by itself as Khalid Ibn Yazid [born
about a.d. 673] says, “When I saw the Water coagulating itself I
became sure that the thing was right as has been described. Do not
be in doubt, for your Lord is powerful. What you have spent on it and
what has been lost will surely be restored to you.” 30

We see in the last quotation that Womb and Alchemic Vessel
were identified. In another passage Ibn Umail attributes to Hermes
the imagery of union in marriage, followed by conception, gesta¬
tion and birth. “Know that the Marriage and Conception takes
place by putrefaction in the lower part of the vessel. The Birth
of this Child that will be born to them will be up in the Air, i.e.
in the head of their vessel. The head of the vessel is the top of the
Dome and the Dome is the Mnbiq.” zl We may recall also the
Ouroboros surrounding the Womb in the magical gems. Similarly
the Furnace was conceived as a womb from very early days. The
earth was a woman, crevices and caves her vaginal orifices;
stones grew in her body, and river-sources were the waters she
let loose from it. The dead dwelt in her like some sort of shadowy
embryos. “O you who are in the vagina of Neith, in the Hall of
the Tribunal .” 32

Plinius remarks that the galena mines in Spain were reborn “after
a certain time”. If we look back to the earlyer days of Mesopo¬
tamian metallurgy a text from the Assyrian library of Assur-
banipal shows that the processes were heavily hedged with ritual.
A propitious month and day were selected; the furnace-area was
consecrated; the uninitiated were prevented from coming in;
the workmen were cleansed with incense and a beer-libation was
offered up to the ores; sacrifices followed. A special wood, cut
in the month of Ab, bark-stript and stored in a skin-envelope,
was used for the fire. The term ku-bu is uncertain: it has been
translated as divine embryos, a sort of demon, abortion, fetishes
to protect the smelting. But it is used in the Creation Myth to
designate the monstrous body of the slain Tiamat, from which the
world is made and which is likened to a foetus. The ku-bu in the
furnace-ceremony were thus probably the ores, considered as

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE

earth-embryos, but they may have been foetuses and used in
some sacrificial rite . 33

In Africa today among the Achewa of Nyasaland a sorcerer
brings on a miscarriage so as to use the foetus for the success of
fusion; he burns it with other medicines in a hole in the ground,
and the furnace is then built over the hole . 34 The Atonga throw
into the furnace a part of the placenta to ensure success in smelt¬
ing. The Baila sing during the work: “Kongwe [clitoris] and Malabo,
the Black [vaginal lips] fill me with horror. I found Kongwe as I
fanned the flames of fire. Kongwe fills me with horror. Pass from
me, pass far, you with whom we have repeated intercourse, pass
from me.” The Baikitara treat the anvil as a bride, bring it into
the house as if in nuptial procession; the smith tells his wife he
has brought a second wife in and sprinkles the anvil with water
“so it may beget many children”. While the Baila build a furnace,
a lad and girl go inside and crush beans (imitate the crackling of
fire); later they must marry one another . 35

Animal sacrifices are linked with metallurgical processes.
Among smiths of Tanganyika medicines are put into the furnace;
children sacrifice chickens before the mastersmith and sprinkle
blood on the fire, ore, charcoal, a child goes into the furnace to
put the medicines in a basin hollowed in the base, deposits there
two hen-heads, and covers the whole with earth. The smithy is
sanctified with the sacrifice of a cock, its blood is scattered over
the stone anvil with the words, “May this forge not blemish my
iron, may it bring me wealth and fortune .” 36 Again the smiths
of Tanganyika made several kinds of hole in a kiln. The widest
had the name of Mother; out of it at the end came the dross slag
and roasted ore. The opposite hole was called the Father, and to it
was attached one of the best bellows. The intermediate holes were
children. The furnaces of the Nashona and Alunda were woman¬
shaped . 37 The Arabs called hard iron male and soft iron female.
Weapons, as forged out of metals, were given sex, especially
swords. The poet Ibn Errumi refers to the male cutting-edge and
the female blade. Swords, as well as drums and bells, were given
sex in China . 38 In European metallurgical terms the kiln where
enamelling material was smelted was the matrix or womb. Mutter-
schoss. We find similar imagery used for many other kinds of
vessels used in forging, cooking and other processes using heat.

Human sacrifice in Chinese metallurgy is suggested by the tale
of Mo-ye and Kan-tsiang, man and wife. Kan-tsiang, a smith,

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE

292 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

could not get the metal to fuse; his wife reminded him that a
human sacrifice was needed. He told her that his master had
brought the fusion about only by throwing himself and wife into
the furnace. Mo-ye agreed to sacrifice herself if he did likewise,
but they managed the matter by giving a part for the whole, hair-
cuttings and nail-parings for their bodies. In another version
the smith says that his dead master wedded a girl to the furnace-
spirit; so Mo-ye threw herself in and the casting took place. In
other accounts a smith consecrates cutlasses with the blood of his
two sons, and oxen and horses are sacrificed for the production
of eight swords . 39 We may recall the Kabeiric legend of the mur¬
dered brother in Greece and wonder if there were actual human
sacrifices or ritual mimes of death-rebirth.

Of particular interest are the customs of some tribes in Central
India. The Asurs are a tribe of smiths who seem to have lived in
the North Punjab till expelled by Aryan invaders and driven to
the mountains of Chota Nagpur. They have been connected with
the Asur and Asuras of the Vedic hymns, those enemies of the
gods in endless conflicts. In one of their myths the supreme god,
Singa-Bonga, is annoyed by the furnace-smoke, and sends his
messengers the birds to have it stopped. The smiths refuse and
mutilate the birds. Singa-Bonga descends and, unrecognised,
he persuades the Asurs to enter the furnace, where they are
burned. Their widows become spirits of nature. The Munda tell
how at first men worked for Singa-Bonga in heaven. Then they
saw their faces mirrored in water and they knew they were like
like God and thus his equal. They refused to serve and were hurled
down to earth, where they fell on a place with iron ore. There
they built seven furnaces. Again the smoke displeased the god,
whose bird-messengers were disregarded. He came down himself
as a sick old man. The furnaces broke up and the smiths asked the
old man’s advice. He said that they must make human sacrifices.
No one was ready to die, so he offered himself. Going into the
white-hot furnace, he stayed there for three days, then emerged
with gold, silver and precious stones. So the smiths were keen
to follow his example. They went in. Their wives, operating the
bellows, were disturbed at their outcry, but the old man told them
they were shouting as they divided the treasure. So the smiths
were burned to ashes, and the wives were turned into spirits of
hills and rocks. This last story is of special interest since it shows
the idea of magical production of gold in the furnace . 40

293

49. The Cat killing the Serpent at the foot of the Heavenly Tree

The notion of the furnace, the alembic or other such apparatus as
wombs has many ritual links. Take the breast-shaped vases used
by Maria in her kerotakis operations to catch the divine water.
It was certainly no accident that these were called mastariaP 1
Later in Zosimos’ vision we shall meet bowl-shaped altars. The
breast-shaped vase had naturally a fertility-aspect and we find it
linked with Isis, who was represented at times, says Macrobius,
with many breasts or else suckling Harpokrates. In the proces¬
sional fresco that ran along the three sides of the precinct of the
Iseum at Pompeii, a young man carried a rounded situla , which
symbolises the goddess’s breast. Such situlae have an important
ritual significance in Mesopotamia and Egypt and are connected
with rebirth as well as fertility. The young man at Pompeii does
not seem a priest; he is probably a mystes, an initiate like Lucius in
Apuleius’ Metamorphoses . 42

To return to alchemic vessels: Stephanos writes, “True is a
certain moist vapour and the dry vapour. The moist is sublimed
by th zphanoi which have nipples. But the dry vapour [is distilled]
by the pot and bronze cover, as is the white vapour from cinna¬
bar.” Phanos usually means “torch, lamp, lantern”. Olympiodoros
uses it as equivalent to cup: “a cup or phanos of glass lying on the
top.” But Stephanos’ description clearly sees it as a breast-vessel;
vapours collect in it as milk in the breast, and come out through
the nipple. It seems, however, to have also had a serpent-form.
Zosimos remarks, “It is possible to fix mercury in the phanos and
similar apparatus with, as it were, a serpent-shaped base”—

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE

294 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

presumably an enclosing serpent like the Ouroboros. The alembic,
in which the Stone was born, was modelled on the womb, and
the retort or vessel-with-a-nose represented the placenta. Mating
took place in the lower part of the alembic, while the child, the
resulting spirit or pneuma , was born in the upper part.

Observe closely the fire in the art and the birth of the spirit that does
not remain fixed. Then also mistakes become previous irritadons, the
female coldness, the slow-to-move, the miscarriage. Therefore also the
womb, lustful and virgin and the place of the man, all desirous when¬
ever it may be made quick, is that which is the aphrodisiac symbol of
joy and love, which is laughter. So also the melters of gold, understand¬
ing what they say, say “They laughed” . . . (Stephanos).

In the last sentence he is trying to explain, it seems, a passage
from the Diplosis of Eugenios-. “Burnt copper 3 parts, gold 1 part:
melt and throw in arsenic, calcine and you’ll find it brittle, the

triturate with vinegar 6 days in sun, then after drying melt silver_

and it laughed. Even if some very early copyist has made
some mistake here over his text, the meaning is in accord with
the message of Kleopatra: that both the metallic body and the
alchemist suffer and feel joy in the processes. Not only do the
substances mate in the alembic, the alchemist also at the same
time mates with nature. The word phanos, we may add, with its
strong suggestion of brightness, suggests a Breast of Luminous
Milk, a thing of beauty and delight.

It is a short step from the mystery-cup of the divine breast to
the baptismal bowl, such as the Hermetic Krater or the Cup of
Living Water in Sethean theology. A Syriac poem by Narsai on
Baptism (5th century) gives us an alchemic view of the bowl:

The Supreme Artisan has produced a New Art.

Without Composition, Man re-makes Man.

An unprecedented invention found by divine symbolism:

Man begets without Seed in the Womb of Water

Even if water begets reptiles and birds,

we have never heard before of it getting humans . . , 43

The reference to the artisan with a new art which does not use
composition shows clearly that Narsai has the alchemists in mind.
Men are changed in the bowl as metals are changed in the alembic.

It is again only a short step, though a crucial one, to imagine
the person reborn through the magical or regenerative fluid as

295

somehow metamorphosed into the vessel that holds the immor¬
talising fluid. The body sloughs its mortality and becomes the
divine vase itself. After death the Valentinians thought they could
render themselves invisible to the powers encountered on the
way up to the light. To the powers of the Demiurge they declared,
“I am a Precious Vessel worthier than the female creature who
made you. Your Mother knows not her origin,but I know myself.”
That is, they had become the vessels of regeneration and thus
could reject the earthly mother. They had been reborn in the pot
like the substances of Ibn Umail’s alchemic account.

Above all the martyrising fire could thus transmute the body
born of an earthly mother into a vessel that was wholly the
father’s work. We saw this idea expressed in the account of
Polykarp’s death. 44 Here we may add further material bearing
on this point. Theodoros of Mopsuesta in the 4th century wrote
on the theme of baptism: “It becomes you then to think that you
fall into the water as into an oven [furnace] and that you are
renewed and reformed so as to be changed into a perfect nature
and to leave your old mortality and completely receive an immortal
and indestructible nature.” 45 Behind this imagery lies the tale
of the men in the oven in III Daniel , which was much used as a
parable of baptism and resurrection. The version made by Theodo-
tion told how the three men “fell into the midst of the burning
oven”. This chapter was one of the liturgic readings in the course
of the solemn vigil of Easter in the basilica of Constantine at
Jerusalem while the arrival of those to be baptised was awaited. 46

In the Brihadaranjaka Upanishad we read: “And as a goldsmith
takes a piece of gold and gives it another form, new and more
beautiful, in the same way this I, after rejecting its body and chas¬
ing out all ignorance, makes it into a new and more beautiful
form, whether it resembles the Ancestors or the Ganharvas or
the Devas or Prajapati or the Barhman or other beings.” 47 The
Christians used similar language of the glorified body. Kyrillos of
Jerusalem in his 18th Catechism of Baptism says that the body will
survive in eternal life, but transformed, “just as iron in contact
with fire becomes fire”. The bodies of the just will shine. 48

The Christian writers on baptism pondered much on Daniel
(xii, 3): “They that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the
firmament,” and on I Corinthians (iii, 15), which they misunder¬
stood because of their obsession with the cleansing and trans¬
muting fire: “If any man’s work shall be burned, he shall suffer

296 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

loss; but he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.” The actual
reference was to ordeal. 49 John of Lykopolis (about 394) wrote:

Exactly as iron, put in the fire—and the fire penetrated it and is in¬
corporated with it—is united with the fire and takes its likeness and
its colour, and does not show itself under its old aspect, but becomes
like fire, since the iron has been absorbed by the fire and the fire by the
iron, and they have become one, in the same way when Christ’s love
has entered into the soul, that love which is the living fire burning the
straw of sin to deliver up the first, the soul that was old becomes new,
it was dead and it becomes living; and the likeness of nature is changed
to the likeness of God. 50

The idiom was already well worn. Methodios of Olympos (about
311) compared Man, God’s masterpiece, to a fine statue made by
a skilled artist. Destroyed by an evil-minded person, it can be
recast and remade. It is the same with Man deformed by the
Devil. “The recasting of this statue is here the death and dis¬
solution of the body; the renewal and restoration of matter is here
the resurrection. Further, restoration is easier work than the
original creation. Look still at the artist. It is not so hard to give a
bronze vessel the same form after having cast it as to make some¬
thing new from raw matter. That demands more work. The metal
must first be burned, then cast: that is, purification and then the
creation of an artistic form.” Augustine took up the symbolism
in his Enchiridion. However, though many early Fathers com¬
pared the creative activity of God to that of a skilled worker,
they usually chose the potter. 51

In later times, however, the theme of the rejuvenating smith
was common in folktales, popular plays, and the like. A typical
example is the following from Middle English. A smith in Egypt
is rich and proud, an unequalled master. To punish his pride,
Jesus Christ comes and asks him to forge an iron rod that can
show the way to a blind man. The smith wants to know how that
is possible. Christ replies that he can do it, as well as giving youth
to the old. The smith gets his old, blind and lame mother-in-law,
and at Christ’s orders puts her on the fire till she is incandescent
without feeling pain. Christ then places her on the anvil and
forges her without breaking a bone till she is as she was at thirty
years. He then refuses to hand on his lore to the insistent smith.
The latter, however, tries his hand on an old, blind, paralysed
woman and smashes her up. Scared, he runs off and prays; Christ

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE

297

in pity blesses the woman, who revives. Christ promises the man
that he will be the mastersmith but must not burn people. In
variants, Christ, wandering with St Peter, takes off a horse s feet;
the smith imitates and fails. 52

The motive of the apprentice or aspirant who tries to imitate
some magical acts and fails is very old. Philostratos in his Ufe of
Apollonios has the story of the apprentice who tries to use the
bucket of the master-magician to raise water and cannot stop it.
Ailian tells a tale of the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros with its
miraculous cures. A woman wanted to be cured of tapeworm;
a servitor cut off her head and removed the worm, but could not
put the head back; the god, summoned, duly did the miracle.
This tale was a piece of Epidaurian propaganda to outdo a tale
from Troizen. Circumstantial details were added and we hear of
the woman, Aristagora, lying all day with severed head. 53

Behind all the ideas and images of a forged immortal body of
metal or gold there lies the ancient idea of gods whose incorrup¬
tible bodies were made of such substances. We noted such ideas
at the outset of this book. They went back to the days of the
Pyramid texts. The god is indistinguishable from his deathless
image. A New-Kingdom address to Thoth (in the form of a
squatting ape) declares:

Ape with white hair and pleasant form, with friendly nature, beloved
of all men. He is of sehret- stone, he, even Thoth, that he may illumine
the earth with his beauty. That which is upon his head [moondisk] is
of red jasper and his penis of quartz. His love leaps [?] on his eyebrows
and he opens his mouth to bestow life. 54

Ptah blesses Ramses II in the Abu Simnel temple, saying, “I
have wrought your limbs of electron, your bones of copper,
your organs of iron.” And a magic papyrus has a spell entitled.
“What the eight great gods of primordial origin say when they
render homage to the god who is among them, whose bones are
silver, whose flesh is gold, and whose hair is a true stone of azure.
In the ritual of embalming:

In a long speech the deceased is addressed and told the liquid [immers¬
ing his backbone] is “secret”, and that it is an emanation of the gods
Shu and Seb, and that the resin of Phoenicia and the bitumen of
Byblos will make the burial perfect in the underworld, and give him
his legs, and facilitate his movements, and sanctify his steps in the Hall
of Seb. Next gold, silver, lapis-lazuli, and turquoise are brought to the

2 9 8 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

deceased and crystal to lighten his face, and carnelian to strengthen his
steps; these form amulets which will secure for him a free passage in
the underworld. Meanwhile the backbone is kept in oil, and the face of
the deceased is turned towards the heavens; and next the golding of
the nails of the fingers and toes begins. When this has been done, and
portions of the fingers have been wrapped in linen made at Sals’, the
following address is made to the deceased:

“O Osiris, you receive your nails of gold, your fingers of gold, and
your thumb of smu [or usasm\ metal; the liquid of Ra enters into you as
well as into the divine members of Osiris, and you journey on your
legs to the immortal abode. You carried your hands to the house of
eternity, you are made perfect in gold, you shine brightly in smu metal
and your fingers shine in the dwelling of Osiris, in the sanctuary of
Horus himself. O Osiris, the gold of the mountains comes to you; it
is a holy talisman of the gods in their abodes, and it lightens your face
in the lower heaven. You breathe in gold, you appear in smu metal,
and the dwellers in Re-stau receive you; those who are in the funeral
chest rejoice because you have transformed yourself into a hawk of
gold by means of your amulets of the City of Gold.” 55

50. Serpent enfolds ithyphallic Osiris

There is yet one more point about the urgent desire that was felt
to transform the flesh. The male wanted to become a statue of
gold, a thing of purified metal, a vase of fire-hardened clay, no
longer subject to the accidents and corruptions of the flesh. The
female wanted all that too, but she, the “weaker vessel”, started
with a disadvantage and had to become male in the process, so

WOMB FURNACE AND VASE 299

utter was the contempt for the mother-body. There was a belief
that all female elements must become male in order to unite with
the angels and enter the Fullness, the Tleroma. Thus the gnostic
Theodotos believed. And in The Gospel of St Thomas , used by some
Gnostics (such as the Naasenes), the last logion runs:

Simon Peter says to them: Let Mary go from our midst, for women
are not worthy of Life. Jesus says: See, I will draw her so as to make
her male so that she also may become a living spirit like you males.
For every woman who has become male will enter the kingdom of
heaven. 56

The rejection of the mother, the female, appears in the saying of
Jesus: “Woman, what have I to do with you?” Tertullian con¬
demns women: “You are the gateway of the Devil, you are the
unsealer of the forbidden tree, you are the first rebel against the
divine law, you are she who persuaded him whom the Devil was
not strong enough to attack. So easily did you shatter the image
of God in man.” And so her only hope was to cease being female.
On judgment Day “women will have the same angelic sub¬
stance, the same sex as men”. Jerome taunted women with trying
to make themselves like men as the result of such condemnations.
They “change their garb and put on men’s dress, they cut their
hair and lift up their chins in shameless fashion”. St Gregory of
Nazianzan coins the paradoxical phrase: “to be male [andrigesthai]
in female matters”. 57

Accompanying this wish to abolish femaleness was a wish to
abolish sex itself. In The Gospel according to the Egyptians-.

When Salome inquired when the things about which she asked would
be known, the Lord said: When you have trampled on the garments
of shame and when the two become one and the male with the female
is neither male nor female.

The Gospel of Philip declared, “Christ came to re-establish what was
thus [divided] in the beginning and to reunite the two. Those who
died because they were in separation he will restore to life by
reuniting them.” The Second Epistle of Clement™ “When the two
shall be one, the outside like the inside, the male with the female
neither male nor female.” The logia of Jesus repeated, “When you
make the two become one, you will become the Son of Man, and
if you say. Mountain remove yourself, it will remove itself.
And there were close parallels in the New Testament. Galatians

300 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPR

(iii, 28) stated. There is neither male nor female, for you are all
one in Christ Jesus. 59 It followed that in the beginning there had
been no sex. 60 Simon Magos called the primordial spirit male-
female. The Naasenes saw the celestial Man, Adamas, as arseno-
thelys; and every man still held inside himself the power of be¬
coming a celestial hermaphrodite like the Logos. The Epistle of
Eugnostos the Blessed saw the Son as the first generative Father,
also called the Adam of Light; he mated with himself, with his
Sophia, and produced a great male-female light “which is by its
male name the Saviour, creator of all things, and by its female
name Sophia, the all-mother, also called Pistis. From these two
are born six other pairs of spiritual hermaphrodites, who produce
72, then 360 other entities.” 61

The Mother is thus smuggled into the cosmogony as the female
aspect of himself with whom the Son mates; but she is tolerated
only in this disguised and inferior form. As the deities with whom
union was sought were always conceived as male—in the Chris¬
tian formulation, triply male—the notion of male and female being
absorbed into unity was felt emotionally as a transcendence of
femaleness and thus an elimination of sex. Hence the extreme
hostility to women that keeps breaking through the abstractions.
Women thus had a double urgency in the desire to rise above
the flesh; and perhaps it was natural that a woman, Maria, led
the way in devising the Pot or Transformative Womb by which
Matter might, it was hoped, be changed and lifted on to a higher
level —that of the stable purity of gold.

Agathodaimon

We now come to what is perhaps the most problematic figure
among all these problematic figures, the founders of alchemy:
Agathodaimon. The name is plain enough in meaning: the Good
Spirit; and we have seen that Spirit already turning up in a num¬
ber of connections, though not with any clear character. There
was a geographer Agathodaimon, apparently of the 2nd century
a.d., but there is no reason to think this man an alchemist.
Under Agathodaimon’s name we have an alchemic commentary
addressed to Osiris and dealing with The Oracle of Orpheus,
another of the 2nd-century apocrypha, which was held in high
esteem by the Gnostics. There he speaks of the art of whitening
or yellowing metals as well as giving various recipes. 1 We find
elsewhere an aphorism of his: “After the refinement of copper
and its blackening and later whitening, there will be the solid
yellowing.” 2 He is also linked with Hermes in the Riddle of the
Stone.

Olympiodoros says, “Some say he is an ancient, one of the old
philosophers of Egypt, others, a mystic angel or good daimon,
Egypt’s Protector. Others call him the Heaven, as his symbol is
the image of the world. Indeed the Egyptian hieroglyphs, wanting
to denote the world on obelisks in sacred characters, depict there
the serpent Ouroboros.” 3 We may surmise that Agathodaimon
was connected with Ouroboros because of his own serpent-form.
Certain Gnostics, who adored the serpent as his emblem, kept
domestic snakes called agathodaimones, house-guardians. The
Agathodaimonites, indeed, have been taken for alchemists. 4

We shall soon have more to say of Agathodaimon as a snake.
For the moment let us look at him as a person linked with
Hermes. A Discourse of Hermes to Tat, On the Common Intellect
(Nous), states:

AGATHODAIMON

302 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Is not the adulterer bad, the murderer bad, and so on with all the others ?
The man who has the logos [word], my child, does not suffer through
having committed adultery, but he suffers as if he had; not through
having killed, but as if he had killed. For if it’s not possible to escape
the condition of change any more than that of birth, he who possesses
nous has the power of getting away from evil.

That’s why, my child, I have always heard Agathodaimon say—and
if he had written and published it, he would have rendered a great
service to the human race: for he alone, my child, because as the
firstborn god he had truly contemplated all the assemblage of beings,
would utter divine words—I have then heard him say one day that
“All is One, and, above all, the Intelligible Beings; that we five by the
power, by the energy, and by the Aion; and that the nous of the latter,
which is also its psyche, is good.” 6

Psyche here means the I, perhaps the Double or Ka. A magic
papyrus says: “You are the soul of the Daimon of Osiris, [the
soul] which revels in every place.” And Ploutarch calls Apis the
image, eidolon, of Osiris’ soul. 6 “All is One” we have met as a
basic alchemical axiom, which perhaps goes back to Herakleitos:

Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to acknowledge
that all things are one.” 7 And it has been suggested that a gather¬
ing of Herakleitan “oracles” served as the basis for an Egyptian
collection of Agathodaimon’s logia. 8 Kyrillos of Alexandreia knew
of a logos of Agathodaimon to Osiris. 9

We have three passages from Kyrillos in which the name
appears. In the first, indeed, it is only used in an address to
Hermes by the servitor of an Egyptian sanctuary, who wants to
know what the Logos is. Hermes tells him that it is “generative
and demiurgic”. In the Hermetic treatise. The Key, we are told
that the universal nous is the Agathos Daimon. 10 With the second
passage from Kyrillos, however, we seem to touch a more distinct
character, whether deity or man. Hermes is talking to Asklepios.

Then Osiris asked, “Well, very great Agathos Daimon, how did the
earth appear in its entirety?”

The great Agathos Daimon replied, “According to a system and a
drying-out, as I have said: the mass of waters received, from that
instant on, the command to recoil upon themselves and the earth
appeared in its entirety muddy and shaken with tremblings. For the
rest the sun spread out its light and did not cease burning and drying
out things thoroughly, and the earth was solidly fixed in the midst of
the waters, surrounded by water on all sides.” 11

3°3

In the third passage Agathodaimon is again instructing on the
origin of things:

And Osiris said, “O thrice-great Agathos Daimon, by what cause has
risen this great Sun that we see?”

The great Agathos Daimon replied, “You want me, Osiris, to set
out the sun’s generation—by what cause it has risen? It has risen by the
providence of the Master of all things.” 12

Again the discourse turns to the creative logos. All these passages
do not, however, give the shadowy figure any clear features. He
appears as a vague doublet of Hermes, except perhaps that his
main concern is with the creative or cosmogonic process, which
is suitable enough for an alchemist. And this point brings us to
Kamephis, who seems identified with him, and to a passage cited
from the Lore Kosmou earlier in another relation, that of the
Black Earth. 13 Isis tells Horos:

You hear here the secret doctrine that my ancestor Kamephis learned of
Hermes the Memorialist, who relates all the facts; then [I learned them]
from Kamephis, our ancestor of all, when he honoured me with the
gift of the Perfect Black; and now you from me.

This Kamephis, Kmephis or Kmeph, is in effect an ancient god
under his various Greek forms. The name should correspond
with the Egyptian Kamutef, which denotes the God Father-of-
his-Mother: that is, the first unbegotten begetter, autogennetos,
who is identified with Amum-Re-Kamutef or with ithyphallic
Min . Kamutef is thus a form of the ancient hermaphroditic
demiurge whom we discussed in the last chapter. 14

His only appearance in a Greek text seems in Damaskios, in a
passage that deals with Three ICamepheis, a demiurgic trinity. 15
The first god came from the original pair of arched, principles:
the water and sand of Egypt. The second came from this first;
the third from the second. The triad constitutes the intelligible
world in its totality. Damaskios says that such is the account given
by Asklepiades, apparently the Egyptian whom the Souda
describes as having a deep knowledge of his country’s theology
and who wrote hymns to his native gods. He is said to have
written a book on the concord between the different religions;
and Suetonius gives him the name of Mendes — so that presum¬
ably he came from the same town as Bolos. 16 The third Kamephis,
we are told, was the Sun and also the Intelligible Intellect. 17 We see

304 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

in the Kamepheis one of the forms of the Neoplatonic trini ty In
the Kore Kosmou the name seems chosen so as to make Isis’ revela¬
tion go infinitely back in time—just as the pseudo-Manethos,
cited by Synkellos, links his gnosis with books in the sanctuaries
of temples that date back to the second Hermes, son of Agatho-
daimon and grandson of the first Hermes. In the Kore Kosmou,
indeed, the author as a result has produced an illogicality:
Kamephis is the most ancient of all, yet he gets the gnosis from
Hermes. Efforts have been made to reorganise the text so as to
make him the first owner of the lore which he hands on to Hermes,
who hands it on to Isis; but they are probably unnecessary, 18
Kamephis-Kmeph is further somehow entangled with Khnum-
Kneph, so that Kamephis merges with the ram-headed creator-
god of Elephantine and the First Cataract, who was worshipped
in many sanctuaries. Khnum made men and women on his potter’s-
wheel; “Maker of things which are, creator of the things which
shall be, the source of things which are, father of fathers, mother
of mothers” he was called in the New Kingdom, and thus appears
as another hermaphroditic demiurge. 19 The line of descent here,
of Kamephis from Khnum, is not all at clear and has been denied. 20
However, the link of Kneph and Agathodaimon is attested by
Philon of Byblos: “The Phoinikians call it [the Living Snake]
the Agathos Daimon while the Egyptians name it Kneph and
attach to it the head of a falcon.” The same Falcon-headed Snake
is identified with Kneph in the pseudo-Persian source found in
Philon and John Lydos. 21

The magical gems do much to fill out the picture. Here indeed
we do find the god Khnum linked with a serpent: On one side
we see a bearded serpent coiled on the right; on the reverse is an
inscription Chnoubis Nabis Bienout —a corruption of a common
formula, Chnoubis Naabis Biennouth , which is normally met in
connection with the bearded serpent. Chnoubis is a late variant
of Khnum. 22 Naabis seems linked with the Egyptian root, nhp,
which denotes the potter’s-wheel or else an hypostasis of the god
existing independently or under the form Khnum-Nph . 23 Biennouth
corresponds to an Egyptian term meaning the soul-of-the-god.
This name suits Khnum in particular, since the Egyptian for Ram
was homophonous with the word for the Soul. The Egyptians
liked this sort of serious pun, which was felt to reveal hidden
connections; here they built up theological subtleties on the

AGATHODAIMON 3°5

similarity of sound, making the Divine Ram the Soul of the Gods
and associating the four forms he assumed in his four sanctuaries
with the four great elementary gods. 24 Thus we find that each
term of the inscription on the gem links with Khnum.

But how did the serpent thus come to merge with a god who
was supremely ram-headed? Here we seem to find a fusion of
Kneph, normally shown with a lion’s head, and Agathodaimon,
who is bearded. How it occurred will become clearer as we go on.

Agathodaimon as a snake was naturally associated with the
Earth. This relation is brought out by another intaglio where we
see him coiled up with a pschent-aown on his head and the word,
Gaia (Earth). There may be a reference to his creative forces
here; the pschent recalls royal power—Manethos calls the third
ruler of the 1st dynasty Agathodaimon. 25 On a third intaglio an
Ouroboros encircles the womb, which is closed with a five¬
toothed key and surmounted by Isis, Chnoubis the lion-headed
snake, a dog-headed mummy and Nephthys. Here Chnoubis is
clearly the creator-god set between two goddesses associated in
the ceremonies that attend birth. Inside the field is inscribed
aei 0 e ouo, and round the Ouroboros, soroormer-hergar . . . riourin,
in which we see fragments of a formula often linked with amulets
protecting the womb. 26 What matters for us here is the evident
connection of Khnum-Kneph-Chnoubis. The gems show us the
welter of often strongly-felt associations going on busily at the

5 2. Chnoumis gems

}o6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

popular level in the Graeco-Roman world. We may add that in a
magical papyrus we meet both the Ouroboros and Chnouphi;
and that in the Greek alchemic Lexikon Cnouphion is given as a
synonym of the alembic. 27

Further aspects of Chnoubis can be seen in other magical
gems. As we noted above, he is one of the gods that guard the
womb (which was regarded rather as a thing or force in itself,
liable to move about and cause much damage). He also helped’
the stomach. A talisman against stomach-trouble is doubtless to
be seen in a grey-blue piece of chalcedony, shaped like a peach-
stone or persea-seed, on which is cut the Chnoubis-snake with
nimbus and seven rays —pesse pesse on the other side (digest!
digest! the word means “ripen or soften by means of heat”).

Galen, writing of the medicinal powers of certain minerals
states:

The testimony of some authorities attributes to certain stones a
peculiar quality which is actually possessed by green jasper. Worn as
amulet, it benefits the stomach and oesophagus. Some also set it in a
ring and engrave on it the radiate serpent, just as King Nechepso
prescribed in his 14th Book. I myself have made a satisfactory use of
this stone. I made a necklace of small stones of that variety and huno-
lt from my neck at just such a length that the stones touched the posi¬
tion of the cardiac orifice. They seemed just as beneficial even though
they lacked the design that Nechepso prescribed. 28

Galen thought the stone radiated some virtue, but deprecated
the value of the magical inscription or design. The snake-design
he speaks of was no doubt the typical Chnoubis, a thick-bodied,
lion-headed snake, but we do find some rayed snakes wholly
serpentine in form. 1

The rays are of importance, bringing out the astrologic con¬
nections. In the sacred book of Hermes to Asklepios, the first
Dekan of the Lion is Chnoumis, who has a lion-head set on up-
rearing coil's, and who rules over all affections of the heart. But
the third Dekan of the Crab has the name Chnouphis, with a
design, however, of a bust resting on a base and owning two
female faces turned in opposite directions. 2 * In Hephaistion of
Thebes, Chnoumis is the third Dekan of the Crab and is helpful
as a phylakterion of the stomach. Charkhnoumis is the first Dekan
of the Lion but nothing is said of his appearance or powers.
His name may appear in forms Cholkhnoubis and Chrachnounis

AGATHODAIMON 307

found on a few amulets of this type. 30 In the work About Stones
by Sokrates and Dionysios we read:

Engrave on it [some sort of onyx] a serpent coiled with the upper part
or head of a lion, with rays. Worn thus it prevents pain in the stomach;
you will easily digest every kind of food. 31

Generally the rays number seven or twelve; at times they are six
or else twelve in six pairs; occasionally there are seven pairs.
When there are seven, the seven vowels are sometimes set at the
end of the rays or between; we also find the letters of Chnoubis
thus treated. Several times the serpent is on or just above a little
altar or base. Variations of the serpent-form include a human
trunk and arms under the lion-head; the man-section wears a
cuirass, with a short-sleeved tunic under it, which falls below
as a kilt; the lower part of the body consists of large snake-coils
either side. The head has six rays; the right hand holds two short
daggers pointed upwards, the left has two stalks of grain. (The
stalks are common in representations of Agathodaimon, thrust
into the coils of the snake-tail.) In one instance the body is nude
save for the kilt, and the hands hold a sword and a palm-leaf; in
another, there are two swords, with the words Chnoubis naabis
biennouth. (The use of military costume, imitating the statues of
Roman emperors, is not uncommon for Egyptian gods, e.g.
Anoubis. And we meet terracottas of Isis which give her human
arms and a tunic from which a snake-coil emerges.) In other
variants a human-headed snake twines round five small ovoids or
a snake with lion-head has several eggs around or between his
coils. These snakes must be guarding the eggs. Yet another variant
has the snake with rayed human head and body apparently
swathed as a mummy. On the reverse of one Chnoubis design is
the inscription, “Keep Proklos’ stomach healthy.” Another
prays, “Place the womb of so-and-so in its proper place, O Circle
of the Sun.” 32

One ordinary Chnoubis stone has on the reverse, as well as
Nabis Biennouth , “Water for thirst. Bread for hunger. Fire for
cold.” The phrases are probably liturgical. For instance, at the
time of Akhenaten, we find:

“You are the father of the motherless, the husband of the
widow. Pleasant it is, the uttering of your name. It is like the
taste of life. It is like the taste of bread to the child, a loincloth to
the naked.” An Ethiopian hymn, used on Palm Sunday, declared:

AGATHODAIMON

308 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

“He is bread to the hungry, spring-water to the thirsty.” And we
may compare a prayer to Thoth in the New Kingdom:

You great dom-palm, sixty cubits high, on which are fruits. Stones are
in the fruits and water in the stones. You who bring water to a place far
away, come, deliver me, the silent one. Thoth, you sweet well for one
who thirsts in the wilderness. It is closed to him that finds words, it is
open to him who keeps silence. 33

53. The Sungod of Night surrounded by the Five-headed Serpent of
Many Faces; on his head the Beetle of Khepri, the rising sun of the

next day

The formula on the Chnoubis stone reminds us of the alchemist
aim of driving out hunger.

We may now try to draw together some of these scattered
pieces of evidence. Agathodaimon, given a snake-form, becomes a
demiurge as well as protector; in his Hermetic role he is linked
or merged with Kamephis or Kneph (Kamutef); and one literary
source calls Kneph a falcon-headed snake. Then comes the more
difficult merging with the demiurgic ram-headed Khnum, who
becomes linked with Kneph and Ivmeph. A magical lion-headed
snake Chnoubis is in turn associated with Khnum. That these link¬
ings went on at the popular level revealed by the magical texts and
gems is supported by the fact that it is in a magical papyrus we
find Khnum as a solar god called Kmeph with the form of a huge
serpent. Taking over from the Theban demiurge, he has shed his
ram-head in favour of the lion, a strongly solar beast. 34

Certainly sound-similarities played a large part in these identi¬
fications ; but there were also astral influences. Snake-forms were
common enough in Egypt, though there seems also a Greek
element in snake-Agathodaimon; the radiate lion-head is solar
and strongly Egyptian. Astrological names and images played a

3°9

considerable part in the series of associations we are examining,
though the process was never at any point simple and direct.
Chnoubis of the amulets had doubtless no original relation to
Khnum. He was merely one of the Dekan-gods who presided,
each over a third of a zodiacal sign: over io° of the circle. 35 The
Dekans determined the night-hours by the passage of certain
stars or constellations through a number of fixed points. The
system was taken over by Greek astronomers under the influence
of the work attributed to Nechepso and was set out in two treatises,
one under the name of Hermes Trismegistos, the other under
that of Hephaistion of Thebes. Chnoumis, we noted, was a
Dekan-god of the Crab; an astrologic text, which gives him this
name, also describes an amulet of the Chnoubis-type for persons
whose birthday falls under the Chnoumis-dekan. Such a persons
were particularly liable to digestive troubles. Chnoumis as a
name is almost certainly linked with Khnum; but it seems un¬
likely that the Chnoubis-amulets were at first devised under
astrological influences. Perhaps the name Chnoumis was attached
to a Dekan after the amulets were being turned out, and represents
an effort to bring Khnum into the Kamephis-Agathodaimon
sphere. In any event it is notable that a sign, very common on
Chnoubis-amulets, is also linked with Chnoumis-Knm of the
Dekan. On Egyptian monuments it appears as an upright snake
crossed by three horizontal snakes. On amulets it is shown as
three similar wavy lines crossing an upright straight line. 36 (We
seem here also to touch a version of the Imakh -caduceus which we
discussed.)

However we analyse the dekan-gods, Chnoubis and Chnoumis,
and the ways in which they came into our complex, they certainly
ended as part of the Agathodaimon-system. We get a further
insight into the syncretic tendencies at work by looking at two
more texts. Iamblichos, dealing with Hermes’ account of the
universe, tells us of “the most ancient principles of things”—
the self-born Father dwelling in the solitude of his own unity—
which are set above the ethereal and igneous gods and the celestial
gods. Of the igneous gods Hermes has left a hundred works, of
the etherial another hundred, and of the celestial a thousand.
Iamblichos goes on:

In another order he sets the god Kneph at the head of the celestial gods
and calls him the intelligence that thinks itself and turns towards
itself other thoughts. He puts before him an indivisible being that he

JIO ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

names also the firstborn and Eikton; in him is the first intelligence and
the first intelligible, which is worshipped by silence alone. Besides
there are other chiefs of the demiurgy of visible beings; for the
intelligence is demiurgic, guardian of truth and wisdom; descending
into generation and bringing into the light the hidden power of secret
discourses, he is called Amon in the Egyptian tongue; accomplishing
all things without falsehood and artistically, truthfully, he is called
phta—the Greeks change Phta into Hephaistos, attaching him only to
his art; as creator of the good, he is called Osiris and takes according
to his various powers different names.

Kneph-Khnum here appears as supreme demiurge, taking over
some of Ptah’s qualities as creator by means of thought and be¬
coming a celestial god, perhaps through Chnoumis of the Dekans.
The Egyptian basis of the name Kneph means “he who accom¬
plishes his time . Chnoumis is the snake-creator playing a part in
the Theban cosmogony; Porphyrios knows him as a demiurge
connected with the cosmogony of the Primeval Egg, but gives
him a human shape. Indeed there is a point where the entangle¬
ment of identifications in the late period becomes confused beyond
sorting out. There is a further link with Ialdabaoth Sack, Gnostic
demiurge, whose name sometimes alternates with that of
Chnoumis in astrological texts. 37 We see how this sort of identi¬
fication went on pullulating in the popular imagination from a
Prayer to the Sun:

I invoke you, greatest of the gods, eternal lord, ruler of the world, you
who are on the world and under the world, powerful ruler of the sea,
who glitter at the moment of day, who rise up for the whole world in
the east and who go to rest in the west. Come, you who rise coming
out of the four winds, gracious Agathodaimon, who have taken for
festival hall the entire sky.

I invoke your sacred names, great and hidden, that you rejoice in
hearing. Under your beams earth has blossomed, the plants have borne
fruit by grace of your smile, at your command the living have begotten
other living beings. Give glory, honour, favour, success, and magic
force to this stone, for which today I carry out the consecration [or,
this phylactery I consecrate] against NN. I invoke you who are great in
heaven, Sabaoth, Adonai, great God, glittering Helios who shine on all
the earth.

You are the great Serpent who walks at the head of all the gods, you
hold the first place in Egypt [the first nome of Upper Egypt, that of
Elephantine, Khnum’s seat], which is also the last of inhabited land
[at the First Cataract in the far south]. You have begotten yourself in

AGATHODAIMON 3 1 T

the Ocean, Pso'i, god of gods, you are he who manifests himself daily,
who sleeps in the northwest of the heavens and who rises in the south¬
east . . .

Yes, Lord Kmeph. I call upon earth and heaven, fight and darkness,
and the great god who has created everything, Sarousis, you, Agatho¬
daimon who aid me, grant me complete success in this operation by
means of this ring and this stone.

(While you operate, say: There is only One Zeus Sarapis.) 38

Dragon-snake and Lion, a magical papyrus tells us, are alike
“physical principles of fire”. In the sun-prayer, Kmeph, Agatho¬
daimon, Helios, Psoi (Psois) are all directly identified with one
another. Psois deserves a glance, for he helps us to understand
how Agathodaimon became integrated in the Egyptian system.
He was one of a pair of old deities, having as consort Ther-
mouthis (Ernutet)—a name traditionally given to Pharaoh’s
daughter who found Moses. As the deification of good luck (Sat
in Egyptian), he was naturally merged with Agathodaimon. As
Psai was the Egyptian name for the city Ptolemais, we may deduce
that he was the divine snake or guardian there. Ptolemaios I had
founded that city; and if Psois was known in it, we may guess
that he was already prominent at Alexandreia and perhaps already
identified with Agathodaimon. Certainly the latter was established
in the capital by the 3rd century b.c. and his female counterpart,
Agathe Tyche, was most likely equated with Thermouthis. At

54. Gem with Chnoumis above an altar and inscription, on reverse “I
ever I am the Good Spirit.”

312 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

some time, probably late in Hellenistic times, the pair of good-
luck deities were identified further with Sarapis and Isis (who had
her serpent-form and was also a Tyche, a Fortune). While Psois
was rather swallowed in the new equations, Thermouthis survived
better in separate form—as indeed also Isis grew in importance
at the expense of Sarapis. The females of the protecting house-
snakes were called Thermoutheis, and were thus Isis’ ministers
in punishing sinners. The two snakes, by the way, that Ptolemaios,
a sober historian, says guided Alexander the Great to the Oracle
of Siwa and back across the desert, were certainly meant as a
divine sign and may be taken to represent Psois and Thermouthis.
If this is so, it looks as if Psois was already identified with Sarapis
and stood for the Agathodaimon of the new political dispensa¬
tion. 39

We also find Thoth brought in. A haematite gem shows a
deity with neck and head of ibis and crowned snake; on the
reverse the lad palindrome, Chnoubis, and the words pesse pesse,
showing that amulet was for stomach-troubles. The odd figure
may be taken as a fusion of Hermes-Thoth and Agathodaimon,
as found also in the inscription Thant Psae on an amulet reverse’
with Thoth s ibis on the other side, holding a caduceus under its
wing and bearing on its head a tiny figure of Harpokrates.
Thaui Psae gives us a dialectal form of Kopt words meaning
Thoth Fortune of Thoth” (Agathodaimon). 40 A chrysolite
shows a crowned snake, with Isis standing in a shrine on the
obverse; the snake might thus be Agathe Tyche or Thermouthis. 41
A figure on a haematite amulet again shows a fusion of Chnoubis
and Thoth; it has two heads, one of an ibis with atef- crown, the
other of a bearded serpent with pschent. The design is encircled
with an inscription arponchnouphi bri[nta\tenophi ermithouth\ and
it has been shown that the second term is applied to Choumis-
Choubis especially in a solar aspect. 42 The first may contain the
Egyptian Har [Horos] and Chnoubis; the third, Hermes-Thoth. In
any event PLrmithouth is an anagram of Phermouthi, the vocative
of Thermouthis.

Chnoubis is further a protector against the Evil Eye; and among
the epithets most usually applied to him are gigantorhektes and
barophita. The first we find as gigantophontes , gigantopantorhektes and
gigantopniktorhektes : he is called giant-killer, giant-annihilator,
giant-render, and apparently giant-throttler. Barophita seems to
mean serpent-crusher. 43

AGATHODAIMON 3 I 3

We could follow up the variants and the shades of significance
in the amulets much further; but enough has been said to bring
out the main points and to show how important was this Chnoub-
Kneph-Khnum figure in the world of magic. Exactly how the
fusions came about, it is hard to say; but in part through astrology,
in part through the sycretisms of magic, the serpent-creator of
Theban cosmogony was merged with creator Khnum; Agatho¬
daimon with his head of a bearded serpent was drawn in;
Chnoumis as first Dekan of the Lion gained himself a lion-head—
Hermes the astrologer described him, “He has a leonine face
emitting solar rays; his whole body is that of a serpent rolled in
spirals, turned upwards.” But probably the general tendency
towards solar identifications has helped to bring in the lion-
image. We saw how snake and lion were now both solar creatures,
and the sun-prayer showed how Agathodaimon, Kmeph and
Helios were connected. All these developments were of the Graeco-
Roman period, indeed largely the product of the Empire; and
the identifications cannot be refuted because they cannot be
found to exist in earlier Egyptian religion. What is obscure is the
precise step taken to bring this and that figure together; the
sequences are lost in the confusion of popular fantasies.

This investigation has not been irrelevant, since it has shown us
further the workings of thought and emotion in the shadowy
underworld of culture in which alchemy was being nourished;
but it has led us away from, rather than towards, any historical
figure who can be given a role in the early history of alchemy.
There is one area, however, in which Agathodaimon does have
some claim to represent such a figure, but that is far from Egypt,
among the Sabians of Harran in northern Mesopotamia. We have
already briefly noticed them, and now we must pay them some
closer attention.

Harran, a Syrian town, lay on the big western bend of the
Upper Euphrates and survived till the ioth century a.d. as the
last outpost of Sumerian, Hittite and Babylonian cultures. In
the process it went through many changes. About 528 b.c. it was
incorporated in the empire of the Medes and Persians; and it
has been suggested that in the following Achaimenid period,
when Egypt also became a part of that empire, a widespread
fusion of cultures went on, which laid the basis of Iranian ideas
in Egypt. A further intermingling of cultures went on in the

AGATHODAIMON

314 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

5 5. Osiris enthroned on the mound with snakes

post-Alexander period, when presumably Graeco-Egyptian ideas
penetrated Syria and the Harran region, bringing the names
Hermes and Agathodaimon. Arab sources show that Harran was
connected closely with India (Sind), the Syrian towns ofDamaskos,
Tyre, and Hieropolis, Heliopolis in Egypt, and Balkh (where the
fire-temple of the Barmacides seems preceded by a temple of the
Babylonian Moongod Sin, and yet earlier by one of the Sumerian
Nannar of Ur). As a metallurgical centre it was linked with the
mines of Asia Minor, Kurdistan, Persia. Successive Mesopota¬
mian dynasties seem to have used it as an important market for
gold, silver, copper, tin, as well as mineral substances like sulphur,
arsenic sulphides, borax; with the later part of the 2nd millen¬
nium b.c. iron and lead must have been added to the list. A men¬
tion of Kharsini in connection with the temple of Hermes
suggests some amount of trade with China, but how far back that
went we have no idea. In any event Harran was well-situated as
a place concentrating metallurgical lores, techniques, and myths
from a wide area, and playing a key-part in their development.
What we know of its cult-systems emphasises this point. 44

The temple of Kronos had an image of the god in Lead; the
associated colour was Black, the geometrical structure of the temple
was hexagonal, and the number of steps to the image’s throne
was Nine. The corresponding systems for the other six deities
was as follows: Zeus, Tin, Green, Triangular, Eight; Ares, Iron,
Red, Oblong, Seven; the Sun, Gold (hung with Pearls), Square,
Six; Aphrodite, Copper, Blue, Triangle (with one side longer

than the other two). Five; Hermes, an Alloy of all the metals
(with Mercury in the hollow interior). Brown, Hexagonal (with
square interior), Four (circular); the Moon, Silver, White, Penta¬
gonal, Three. At the Wednesday service in the temple of Hermes a
Brown Youth, who was a good scribe, was killed and quartered;
the quarters were separately burned and the ashes thrown in the
image’s face. Hermes, with his inner spirit composed of Mercury,
was thus the principal god in many ways—though in early times
the city-deity was the Moon, Sin. But we must remember that all
the evidence is late and does not prove such elaborations at an
early date. For instance the account of the number of steps is
dated about a.d. 1300. What to make of the sacrifice of the Brown
Youth is not clear, except that the story must link with alchemic
notions of death-rebirth centred on mercury.

All the evidence we have of Harran alchemy is also Arab. There
is a translation, Treatise of Warning, ascribed to the Sabian prophet
Agathodaimon; and Al-Dimashqui stated in the 13th century
that the Sabians considered he had derived his lore from Enoch,
who was also Idris or Hermes Trismegistos. The following is a
summary of the doctrine:

The Heavenly Art depends on One Thing. To gain the re¬
quired knowledge from the sayings of Hermes in his books, the
student should stick to the single illuminating sentence: This
Stone by which the Work is performed is a Stone and not a Stone.
It is not an ordinary stone, for it melts and comes out of the essen¬
tial nature of the stones: a Clear Water and a Pure Spirit. After
being mixed with whatever is necessary, and heated, it coagulates

into the Etesian Stone, through which alone tincturing is possible.

Copper, correctly treated, becomes Silver, and, after more treat¬
ments (addition of liquids, trituration, repeated coction), Gold.
Instructions are given about mixing the Stone with the Mercury
(Spirit) of the Burnt Body of Ashes according to the prescribed
weights of the art and exposing the moistened mixture to the
Sun. Care was needed to keep the Mercury in moist union with
the Body till the latter became soft, fusible, divided into its
Elements; for, if the moisture lessens, the Tincture will be imper¬
fect. As fire was the worst enemy of the operation’s success,
much attention had to be paid to the degree of heat reached, to
prevent the Moisture diminishing to such a degree that the Body
would not afterwards accept the Spirit.

The disciples then ask from what is the Stone got, what are its

}l 6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

properties and how the art is to be carried out by experiment.
Agathodaimon tells them that the art was given by God to Shith
ibn Adam, who was ordered to keep his knowledge secret. The
Stone, the Light of the Earth, serves as a guide to all created
things and makes hidden things manifest; it is most resistant to
lire, which only makes it purer and more excellent. “Earth does
not cause it to decay or undergo corruption, on account of what
the creator has combined in it.” In the operation various colours
appear. Red, Yellow, White, Black and Green. Its taste is sweet
like blood, its smell pleasant; it originates from the earth, where
there is temperate heat, proper combination, and the dust is
loose and moist. It is the densest of all things. The first operation
is very difficult and can be carried out only after many days of
coction, trituration and repeated heating following the addition
of moisture. Much patience is needed in the first state of Washing,
Whitening and Rusting. The order of colour-changes is from
Whiteness to Redness: any Blackness at first present in the in¬
organic matter being eliminated and the matter capable of being
endowed with spirit (of being transmuted) thus whitened. Ad¬
mixture is firstly between the Water and the Earth, and the Body
and the Spirit; and secondly, between Water and Water. Combina¬
tion is then effected by means of Fire, so as to unite Natures into
a Single Thing. When the Body has been reduced to fine particles
like ashes, “Blackness will most rapidly change into Whiteness
by which the Noble Gift and most auspicious Boon will be
attained.” Next comes information about the Receptacle to be

56. Silver from Samara with encircling griffin (Hermitage)

AGATHODAIMON 317

used, the heat of the fire (like that of the brooding hen), and the
all-important separation of the Spirit by solution “so that the
grossness of nature will remain .. . and its essential-nature will
have disappeared”.

The agent for bringing about this required subtility in the
material, which makes Tincturing possible, is the Fiery Poison
extracted from the Natures by means of Fire. We are told how to
treat Copper with this Poison till the Single Gum (or product)
white as snow is obtained—called by the sages the White. This is
put in a retort, and heated, first on hot ashes from burnt horse-
dung, till the Blackness that again appears ceases to appear, and
then on a fire of horse-dung. The product is transferred to
another instrument, where similar process of heating, distillation,
and drenching are carried out, till no Blackness at all survives in
the Nature of the substance. Then the Royal Colour appears,
the Purple, “from which comes the Complete Tincture which
eternity and the lapse of time cannot efface. Neither Water nor
Fire causes it to perish, nor will it decay or change as long as the
world abides.” One mithqal (24 carats) of it suffice to transmute
an unlimited quantity of whatever is to be dealt with.

The treatise ends with further warnings against the Enmity of
Fire, the need for subjecting substances to “decay” by many
days’ exposure to the heat of moist horse-dung, which reduces
the compound to fine soft particles. Also the need to remove the
Spirit by solution. Patience is again advised for the work and for
penetrating the enigmatic language of the instruction. Disciples
must be of good understanding, loving wisdom, studying the
books of the sages and, as well, ready to devote themselves to
prolonged meditation. 45

There are many links between these formulations and other
works we have examined. Thus the opening aphorism about the
Stone is accompanied by the statement that the One Thing is
found “among both rich and poor, and from it no spot in the
market is free.” (The aphorism itself is found in the Arab version
of one of Zosimos’ treatises to Eusebios.) Maria, as cited by Ibn
Umail, spoke of coction of Soul and Spirit into a single thing like
Marble; the Arab version of the Zosimos treatise refers to the
Etesian Stone as like marble in its extreme whiteness; Agatho¬
daimon compares it to Snow—apparently a local touch, since
Harran had snow-capped mountains on both north and west.
Zosimos in The Keys of the Art explained that the Stone was

AGATHODAIMON

}l8 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

called Etesian, Annual, since it was reborn every year: showing
that the rebirth-imagery of alchemy was linked with the earth-
revival as well as the death-rebirth of initiation-ritual. We saw
Agathodaimon in a Greek MS referring to the purification of
the minerals as producing something “like acacia-gum or drops”.
We found both Hermes and Kleopatra insistent on gentle heat;
like Agathodaimon they looked to the Sun rather than to violent
Flame. Exposure to sun and dew appears in the recipes of Demo-
kritos and of the Stockholm papyrus. The Single Gum of Agatho¬
daimon seems argyrokolla , comparable with the chrysokolla of
Hermes. Though a visible product resulted from the operation,
holla (gum) may be taken as expressing the operative power
inside matter, through which the constituent opposites. Body and
Spirit, are linked in the White or Red Elixir. (Atomic valency has
been suggested as a parallel in modern chemistry.) 46

The list of five colours given by Agathodaimon are the primary
ones of the Chinese, who take Yellow as the colour of the Centre. 47
However, when he comes to describing the operations of change,
he uses the Greek system. According to Hermes in The Tittle Key,
the ancients meant by Purple and Purple Stone the Rust of
Copper. Another name seems to have been komaris. Not that
these names imply that verdigris was the elixir; they apply to any
preparations of any substance thought to be of use in bringing
the elixir about. By the action of Fire the Spirit (Mercury) of the
materials in use was set free, until at last, after various other
operations (especially solution and further heating), the Spirit
was reunited with separately purified Matter into an elixir, which
to some extent owned the creative and transforming energy of
the All or the One. 48

Two commentaries, those of Jamasp and Asfidus, seem to
belong to the Harrar tradition. Jamasp’s treatise is ostensibly
dedicated to Ardashir, the first Sassanian king (a.d. 226-41). Such
evidence is not, however, trustworthy, as authors or later scribes
were liable to insert a dedication that seemed to prove the anti¬
quity of a work. Still, the commentaries are of interest in helping
to establish the fact of a definite Harrar school of alchemy, which
looked on Hermes and Agathodaimon as its founders. Axioms of
Hermes on which the school based itself were: Whatever you
sow, you will reap; make the bodies bodiless and the bodiless
bodies; cultivate gold in the white silvery soil and drench it with
the water of life. The first two of the axioms we know well from

3 J 9

our Greek manuscripts. The two commentators cite Demokritos
as saying: “My Master Ostanes used to submit the Nature to
coction from outside, then to triturate it, and [finally] to make the
Poison penetrate into its inside.” 49

What is distinctive about the Harran school is its stress on
the sole use of minerals and metals in the operations, together
with a dualistic theory, which suggests a strong Iranian basis. The
minerals, created by the One out of the One, were made up of two
opposites. Matter and Spirit. Further the metal used in the prepara¬
tion of Gold and Silver is Copper. 50 Though Lead appears in the
Planetary Table of the Metals, it is absent from the alchemic
writings. On the other hand. Lead is basic in the alchemy of the
Greek operators. In order to support the unique nature of the
Harran school it has been asserted that only there does copper
play a serious part, and that where Zosimos mentions it, he is
using the term as a synonym for the Stone (because the red hues
of copper show up at some stage in the processes) or as part of
the name molybdo-chalkos, lead-copper. Such a statement, however,
indeed goes too far. It is true that it is usually hard to tell if an
alchemist is using any term in its literal or its symbolic sense; but if
we were to apply our doubts about literal meanings in a rigid way,
we could ask what it was the Harran alchemists really meant by
Copper. This, however, is carrying scepticism too far. We often
meet copper in Greek formulations: Stephanos thus writes:

So there is no need to be afraid of burning and reducing to ashes all
these bodies. For they come again to a certain power and virtue and re¬
birth, since they own a nature imitative of the whole universe and of
the elements themselves, whence also the rebirth, a communion with a
certain spirit, as of things coming into existence by a material spirit. So
copper, like a man, has both soul and spirit.

For these melted and metallic bodies, when reduced to ashes, are
joined to the fire and again made spirits; for the fire gives freely its
spirit to them. As they manifestly take it from the air that makes all
things, just as it also makes men and all things, thence is given to them a
vital spirit and a soul. So also the fusible bodies, reduced to ashes with
the metallic bodies, recover their soul by a certain method, as if
becoming akin to the fire. And likewise all the elements have creations,
destructions, changes, and restorations from one to another.

So also copper, after it has been many times burnt and restored with
oil of roses and expelled, becomes without stain, better than gold. But
it is necessary to allow of this being threefold, for the untinged, the
being-tinged, and the tinged.

320 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

The last sentence there presents the triadic formula in new terms.
Again Stephanos says:

This copper, suffering all things and being further roasted, becomes the
Etesian Stone in colour, Etesian as something binding. After being-
roasted, it is quenched in the divine moisture, which they call the
divine water, the dissolved oil, and it becomes the thickness of wine
and there remains for 41 days in the gentle heat of a vapour-tight
vessel, the matter being destroyed completes at length the apparent

mystery, holy and sought-for of the water of sulphur. And it is the
otone that does these things.

The Etesian or Annual Stone we have already noted; as a sub¬
stance, apart from a symbol, it seems something pyritic; cuprous
oxide, aes ustum, may be meant here for the copper—that oxide
being of colour like the reddish-purple of the iron oxide got from

“Tb* P 7 ntes ; r ALRazi “ his Shawahid cites Hermes as saying that
e Great Tincture is formed from our burnt copper and our
strong water. From other than these nothing can go forward.

use them together until all the copper is melted and mixes with
the water to form the Great Stone.” 51

However at Harran we do seem to meet a local school firmly
based on copper and its preparations; and it may be conjectured
that the lore of Harran goes back to a period when copper was the
chief metal in use, i.e., roughly 4500 to 1200 b.c. or a little later
when the Iron Age comes definitely in. (Iron rust is mentioned in

• th0Ugh not in the treatise of Agathodaimon

itself. The substances will be formed in the First Operation
just as Iron Rust is formed.” The reference to iron there, it will
be noted, has no primary importance and could be intrusive.)

This concentration on copper, to the exclusion of iron and lead
is certainly striking and does no doubt point to an ancient tradi¬
tion; but to carry alchemic theory, on this evidence alone, back
to the 2nd millennium b.c. is going too far. No doubt proto¬
alchemy proper could not have developed without the conver¬
gence of a pumber of factors, of which Greek philosophy was
one. At most we can suggest that in Harrar some very old metal-
urgical ideas and images, carried on by local craft-fraternities
coalesced during the Hellenistic and Roman periods with methods
and formulations from Egypt and Syria to produce the specific
school of Agathodaimon. It still remains odd that the Greek-
Egyptian names of Agathodaimon and Hermes were used to

AGATHODAIMON 321

denote the founders of Harrar alchemy. Attempts have been
made to find the name Hermes or something like it as that of an
ancient earth-god among the Kilikians and Hittites —Arm a
among the latter, with the Greek Her max related. 52 The origin
of the Greek god Hermes is indeed obscure, but one line of inquiry
has been to link him with herma , hermax, rock, stone, ballast—
with the heaps or cairns of stone piled by roadsides or at holy
places. At least we can certainly say that he was often worshipped
under the form of a stone and that the her ms or hermai which bear

5 7. Serpent-enclosed ithyphallic Osiris

his name were not statues at all, but square pillars, tailing in a
little at the lower end, crowned with a human head, and owning
a penis stuck half-way up the front. There is nothing unlikely
then in his having a primitive stone-god as at least one im¬
portant aspect of his origins, or in this god having a wide early
provenance in Asia Minor. But it is a long jump from the Ur-
Hermes to the learned alchemist of Harran. Flermes may indeed
have had early metallurgical connections; for he was credited
with inventing fire and was identified with ICasmilos (Kadmilos),
one of the Kabeiroi. However, in the case of Harran there is no
evidence at all for the persistance of a cult of Hermes-Arma,
connected with copper-smelting craftsmen, who was merged with
Hermes Trismegistos during the period when Syria and Mesopo¬
tamia were included in the Greek Seleukid empire (312 to 65 b.c.).
At most we can say that during that period, or early in the Roman
Empire, the prestige of Hermes and Agathodaimon were suffi¬
ciently high in the sphere of the occult sciences to be taken over at
Harran to lend importance to the local lores, and that in the process
many ideas from the Egypt of Demokritos-Bolos and Hermes
Trismegistos were drawn on—but not strongly enough to drive
out the copper-basis of the local lores and practices. What is
most impressive in the Harran alchemy of Agathodaimon is its

322 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

insistence on keeping to metals alone for its operations. That fact
does strongly suggest a close link of the ideas with metallurgical
craft-fraternities who, in their mystery-revelations, had many
conservative and ancient elements.

Zosimos

We now come at last to a fairly historical figure, with no mergings
into deities or mythical characters: Zosimos of Panopolis. Pie is
cited by the Synkellos and by Photios; and all the later alchemists
speak of him with respect. He is the Crown of the Philosophers,
his language has the Depth of the Abyss. The Souda says that he
and his sister composed twenty-eight Books, an Alchemic
Encyclopedia, with the title Cheirokmeta like that of Bolos.
Portions survive in Greek, or in Syriac versions. 1 It has been said
that the number twenty-eight was used for his books because he
named each one after one of the twenty-four Greek letters, plus
the four more of the ICopt alphabet. But he may have been think¬
ing of groups of four books, each under one of the seven planets;
or of the lunar month. He was a pagan, but his text suffers from
Christian interpolations, and the alchemist called The Christian
cites him. He was well read in general Hermetic literature, and
knew of the /Gtf/tr-baptism, the fall and the ascent to the First
Man, jAnthropos, the heavenly mirror where the soul sees its true
nature, and so on. But he was still a genuine practising alchemist,
whatever his views on the wider aspects of theory. He was cer¬
tainly not the same man as Zosimos the historian.

He cites Demokritos and Afrikanos. The latter was almost
certainly the Sextus Julius Africanus, at whom we have already
glanced. He seems a Syrian and lived mainly at Emmaos. The
Synkellos says that he wrote on medical science, agriculture,
chemical matters, geography, warfare and the history of Armenia
(drawing on the tabularia of Edessa). His Chronikon in five books
dealt with events from the Creation to a.d. 221 ; parts of it were
extracted by Eusebios in his Chronicle , and some fragments
survive. He wrote to Origen impugning the authority of the
Book of Susanna-, his letter and Origen’s reply are extant. Also he
wrote to Aristeides on Christ’s genealogies in Matthew and Luke.

324 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Another work of his was Kestoi (Girdles) named after Aphrodite’s
Girdle, in twenty-four Books (says the Souda), fourteen (says
Photios), nine (says the Synkellos): a sort of commonplace book
on a wide variety of subjects. The Gepokika includes recipes of
his on the preservation of wine. When Emmaos was burned
down, his fellow-townsmen sent him to solicit Elegabal for
its restoration; he succeeded and a new town, Nikopolis, was
built in 221. The historian Sokrates classes him with Clement
and Origen as one of the most learned Christian writers. However,
the Souda tells us that his remedies consisted of written characters,
incantations and magic words. He is quite likely to have been an
alchemist. He is cited among alchemic authorities and in an initial
list. 2

Zosimos was interested in apparatus, like Maria, whose work
he knew. He wrote a treatise On Instruments and Furnaces, and he
referred to the pneumatic and mechanical work of Archimedes
and Heron. 3 He deals with the tribikos or three-pointed alembic
and its tube; the description is illustrated with figures showing an
alembic, head, tubes, recipient, phials on a furnace, with the
axiom: “Above, the heavenly things; below, the earthly. By the
male and the female the work is accomplished.” Thus he carries
on in the idiom of Kleopatra. His counsel is the traditional one of
silence. Reveal nothing of all that to anyone else and keep these
things to yourself. Silence teaches virtue. It is very fine to under¬
stand the transmutation of the Four Metals, lead, copper, tin and
silver, and to know how they change into perfect Gold.” In
On Fime he ends, “This is the secret one has sworn never to
reveal.” As a result he uses the circuitous and allusive language of
the art. “This stone which isn’t a stone, this precious thing which
has no value, this polymorphous thing which has no form, this
unknown thing which is known of all.” And “here is the Mithraic
Mystery, the incommunicable Mystery”. 4

58. Serpent containing the four cardinal points

ZOSIMOS

3 2 5

It is often said that though of Panopolis he must have worked
in Alexandreia; but there is no reason why he should not have
mainly lived in his home town, which was a lively centre of
culture, with its own mixture of Greek and Egyptian elements
and with a strong pagan nationalism. The letter that he wrote to
his sister, cited in Chapter II, shows that he shared the Pano-
politan outlook. 5 His date seems around a.d. 300. In his Com¬
mentary on the Fetter Omega he often cites Hermes, especially his
On Natures and On Immateriality. The Commentary may represent
one of the twenty-eight books of his encyclopedia; if that work,
arranged on a planetary basis, began with the Moon, the Omega
Book would belong to the section on ICronos. 6 The text is not in
a good state, but it is worthwhile to attempt a rendering:

The letter Omega, the round one, the twy-formed, the unconquered,
belonging to the Seventh Zone of ICronos according to the bodily
sense—for according to the incorporeal sense, it is quite another thing,
inexplicable, as alone Nikotheos the Hidden [a Gnostic to whom an
apocalypse was attributed] has known—according then to the bodily
sense, that which is called the Ocean, “origin and seed of all the gods”,
says the poet [Homer] .. . this grand and admirable letter Omega
contains the treatise on the apparatus of the divine water [sulphur] and
on all the furnaces, mechanical and simple, and generally on all things.

Zosimos to Theosebeia, may all go well with you.

Timely tinctures, woman, have turned the book on furnaces into
ridicule. Many men indeed, on account of having enjoyed the favour
of their own daimon so that they succeeded with timely tinctures, have
mocked at the book on furnaces and apparatus, as not being true. And
no argument could convince them that that book was the truth. Only
when their own daimon left them at the time marked for them by Fate
and they were controlled by another daimon , a disastrous one, have they
been persuaded. Then, after all their art and happiness has been brought
to a stop and the same formulas of chance have been turned into con¬
trary effects, they have been forced in their own despite to face the
evidence of their Fate’s arguments; and so they have admitted that
there was some truth in those procedures that previously they scorned.

But such men could find no admission into the presence of God or of
the philosophers [alchemists]. Let the times indeed change afresh in
form and grow better from one moment to the next, let the daimon
grant them a material benefit, once again they’ll change their opinion
and agree to the opposite of what they were saying. They forget all
the earlier factual evidence, and, always at the pull of Fate, whether
towards the aforesaid opinion or towards its contrary, they can conceive
nothing but material things, nothing but Fatality.

ZOSIMOS

326 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

<t These are the men whom, in his book On Natures , Hermes called:
“Men without intellect, simple puppets in Fate’s procession, without
any idea of incorporeal things, not even of the Fate itself that rightly
drags them along—though they never pause in protesting against her
corporeal corrections, unable to imagine nothing beyond the benefits
she gives.” 7

This is all part of the argument against submitting to Fate, to the
deterministic view of life. Such a view, it is argued, is inevitable
in men who cannot rise to a true consciousness of the nature of
things; for they are indeed at the mercy of forces they cannot
know and so cannot control. For a while perhaps “timely
tinctures —that is, work operating on a schematic system of the
correct “times” for its experiments-may produce good results.
The men are then impermeable to argument. But when things
start going wrong, as they certainly will-since abstract schemes
cannot bring the same consistent results as true knowledge -
then these men are ready to accept the arguments they denied,
but their acceptance is made without understanding and is use¬
less. Zosimos makes clear that he is speaking, not only of crafts¬
men in general, but of certain practitioners of his own art,
whom he considers to be on the wrong track. Though he does 5
not here specify their methods, we may assume that they lacked
in his opinion a grasp of the necessary theory; that they were
trying to apply recipes and formulas without understanding the
triadic principles of transformation and the unitary nature of
matter. He goes on:

Hermes and Zoroaster have declared the breed of philosophers to be
above Fate, as they do not rej oice in the good fortune she gives. Rather,
they are masters of pleasures and are not stricken by the evils she sends
if they truly look beyond all their ills. And they do not accept the fine
gifts that come from her, since they pass their life in immateriality. 8

Here he widens his argument to take in not only alchemists but
all sages who claimed to be above earthly things and the rule of
planetary powers. For the moment he is not discussing how cor¬
rect they are in considering that they live in an “immaterial”
sphere.

The whole bias of his argument is against astrologic determin¬
ism, with which he links the question of timely or apportune
moment, as fixed by the stars. The astrologers claimed to be able
to find out such moments and thus to settle what was the correct

327

time for starting on all enterprises, katarchai. They held that each
section of time, large or small, was dominated by a particular
influence, by a chronokrator star, one that controlled time. Calcula¬
tions of opportune moments were made especially with the Moon
as chronokrator-, her revolution was cut into sections of z\ days: the
time she took to cross a Zodiacal zone. But the principle could be
applied to the Sun or any planet. The system was particularity
strong in Egypt where each of the 36 dekans in turn was the
ruler of one of the 36 dekads; and opportune moments were
worked out hour by hour. (In the account of Alexander’s birth
by the pseudo-Kallisthenes, the magician Nectanebo twice held
up the babe’s emergence so as to make it occur at the moment
favourable for world-empire.) As metals and minerals were
thought to grow and be born, the methods used for finding the
timely moment of katarchai could be applied to metallurgical
process. Clearly many alchemists had given pre-eminence to these
astrologic principles, which Zosimos sees as diverting them from
the real problems of formative process and change. Incidentally
we notice that the descent of Amnael to Isis was determined by
the astrologically timely moment (in one of the versions); Zosimos
would have objected to this detail as an interpolation by the
deterministic school.

That is also why Hesiod shows us Prometheus warning Epimetheus:

“What is in the eyes of men the greatest good-fortune?

“A lovely woman and a lot of money.”

To which Prometheus answers:

“Beware the acceptance of gifts from Olympian Zeus.

Put them afar from you.”

Thus he counsels his brother to reject through philosophy the gifts of
Zeus, that is of Fate.

Zoroaster declares presumptuously that by knowledge of all the
things from on high and the magical virtue of corporeal sounds, a man is
able to ward off all the evils of Fate, both the particular and the universal
ones. Hermes, on the contrary, in his book On Immateriality takes hold
also of magic; for he says that the spiritual man, he who understands
himself, must not redress anything whatever by magic, even if he rates
it as good, nor must he do violence to Necessity. He should let it act
according to its nature and its choice, and he should advance solely by
the quest of himself—holding firmly, in the knowledge of God, to the
ineffable Triad, and leaving Fate to deal in its own way with the mire
that belongs to it—that is, the body.

And thus, he says, by this way of thinking and living, you’ll see the

ZOSIMOS

328 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Son of God becoming all things in favour of the pious souls in order
to draw the soul from the region of Fate and raise it to incorporeality.
See him becoming all—god, angel, vulnerable man. For, since he can do
all, he becomes all he wishes [and he obeys his Father], Penetrating the
body, illuminating the intellect of each man, he gives him the impulse
to climb towards the happy region where this intellect is found before
becoming corporeal, it makes him follow in its track, puts him in a
state of desire, and serves him as guide up to that supernatural light.

Zosimos’ text of Hesiod was somewhat interpolated; and his
interpretation sophisticates the simple meaning in the manner
of the later allegorisers. But what he says about Zoroaster is
important. He rejects the idea that some kind of direct gnosis,
aided by magical forms of compulsion, is the way of mastering
Fate. The position he sets out for Hermes seems at first glance to
be close to that of the Stoics with their emphasis on inner balance
or justice; but for an alchemist the quest for self-knowledge was
necessarily linked with the quest for the clues of inner change in
metals. What Hermes and Zosimos are rejecting is the idea that
one can defeat Fate (all the deterministic mechanisms, which are
identified with the servile elements in society and with bodily
necessities) by sacramental-magic means or by a sheer effort of
will or some short-cut to illumination. These means are con¬
sidered as much a dereliction as the mechanistic approach which
the earlier section of the treatise criticised. The true way is that of
the Furnaces and Apparatus : presumably the way shown by Maria
and Kleopatra, in which at every stage experimental action is
joined with spiritual illumination.

The latter part of Zosimos’ text given above seems to have been
in part changed or interpolated by a Christian scribe or commen¬
tator. The phrase and he obeys his Father” is an obvious intru¬
sion, which attempts to convert the Gnostic saviour into Christ.
What Zosimos has in mind would be easier to state if we knew
more of the gnostic Nikotheos whom he cites at the outset. We
know this thinker only from various references. He was disliked
by the Neoplatonists; his Apocalypse was attacked by the disciples
of Porphyrios. But the Manicheans counted him among the
number of their prophets. In the Gnostic treatise known as the
Bruce Codex we are told of the Monogene, the Only-begotten,
that to speak of him as he is, with the tongue of flesh, is impos¬
sible”. However some specially favoured men have been able to
read the mystery:

329

That is why the powers of the great Aions paid homage to the power
that was in Marsanes, saying, “Who is this man, who has seen such
things face to face?” . . . And Nikotheos spoke about this, for he saw
who this being was, and he said, “The Father exists, superior to every
perfect thing.” He has revealed the Triple Power, perfect and invisible. 0

The Neoplatonists classed him among the Mages. Porphyrios
remarks of two men whom he considered backsliders: “They had
departed from the ancient philosophy and possessed a great
number of works by Alexandros of Libya, of Philkome, of
Demostratos of Lydia ... They also made show of K .evelations of
Zoroster, of Zostrian, of Nikotheos, Mesos, and others like them.
They deceived many people... Plotinos often refuted them.” What
was there about Nikotheos then that made Zosimos admire his
account of being rapt to heaven? With the paucity of our materials
it is hard to say; but perhaps it was an emphasis on the unity of be¬
ing and at the same time on the triadic nature of its manifestations.
It seems we may attribute to Nikotheos the doctrine that the Son
of God, the Monogenes, could become anything—that is, under¬
go any transformation. If so, that would explain why Zosimos
thought he held the great clue which was denied alike to mecha¬
nist-minded seekers and to those relying on magical forces for
short cuts, to those who thought a philosophic asceticism enough
in itself and to those confident in gaining special favours from aloft
by use of appropriate formulas. The alchemic way cut across all
these methods and held that one could truly save one’s soul only
by concretely and scientifically entering into the transformations
of nature, which were also those of the Monogenes, who expressed
the unitary character of process. 10

33 i

33 ° ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Zosimos goes on about this Monogenes, the Primal Man, also
called Adam:

Consider as well the picture that Bitos drew and [what has been written
by] the thrice-great Plato and the infinitely great Hermes: you will see
that Thouth is interpreted in hieratic language as the First Man, the
interpreter of all others, he who gives a name to all corporeal things.

Bitos is again an obscure figure, but he seems clearly the same
person as the prophet mentioned by Iamblichos as interpreting
Hermetic thought; for here again we meet a context of Fate and
its overcoming. The Egyptians, Iamblichos says, do not attempt
to solve cosmic matters by reason alone,

but invite men to ascend, by the aid of hieratic theurgy, towards more
lofty and more perfect beings, superior to Fate, towards God and the
demiurge, and do not work on the matter or carry anything out except
at the exigency of a timely movement.

Hermes has taught this way; and the prophet Bitys has made
King Ammon acquainted with it, having found it written in the
sanctuaries, in the hieroglyphic inscriptions of Sais in Egypt. He made
known that the name of God means whatever is spread out in the whole
world. But there is in his thought many other ways of dealing with the
same subjects, so that you don’t seem to be right when you bring
everything down among the Egyptians to physical causes. 11

The pantheistic note that Iamblichos attributes to Bitys may well
explain why Zosimos thought highly of him. Just as Nikotheos
(if I am right) saw the divine force undergoing transformations
into anything and everything, so Bitys saw that force at work
everywhere and anywhere. Zosimos, by the way, in the last
passage of his cited, makes a common pun on Hermes and
hermeneus (interpreter). He goes on:

The Chaldaians, the Parthians, the Medes, and the Hebrews call him
Adam: which is interpreted as Virgin Earth, earth the colour of blood,
earth red-fire, earth of flesh. We find all this set out in the Libraries of
the Ptolemies, and deposits of these writings were made in each temple,
especially in the Sarapieion, when Anesas the highpriest of Jerusalem
was invited to send an interpreter who translated the Hebrew text [of
the Bible] into Greek and into Egyptian.

Iranian speculations on the Primal Man went far back. Hippo-
lytos tells us that the Chaldaians called him Adam, the Assyrians
Adonis or Endymion, the Phrygians Attis, the Egyptians Osiris,

ZOSIMOS

and the Greeks Hermes—while the Hymn to Attis resumed these
names, adding that the Samothracians called the Primal Man
Adamna, the Haimonioi ICorybas, and the Phrygians also used
the name Papa. 12 As for Adam as the Earth, Olympiodoros adds,
“He became the first man of all out of the Four Elements; he is
called also the Virgin Earth and the Fiery Earth and the Earth
of Flesh and the Earth looking like Blood: you will find these
things in the Ptolemaic Libraries.” We have here a set of puns
worked out by Alexandrian Jews: Hebrew adamah = Earth, and
Greek admes = Virgin. Hesychios has “Adama: Virgin Earth”,
and Josephos says of Adam: “which signifies one that is flame-
coloured as he was made out of fiery [red] earth; for such is virgin
earth.” 13 Zosimos seems drawing on Jewish-Egyptian sources
for his remark on the Bible, which replaces the name usually
given, Eleazar, with Anesas, and adds a (non-existent) version
into Egyptian.

So, the First Man, who is Thouth among us, these peoples have named
Adam, with a name borrowed from the tongue of the angels. And not
only that, but they have named him symbolically, using Four Stoicheia
[Letters, Elements] drawn from the totality of the sphere, according to
the body. The A of this name of this name expresses the rising sun, air;
the D expresses the setting sun, the earth which inclines downwards on
account of its weight; [the second A expresses the north, water]; M
expresses the maturing fire which is intermediary between these bodies
and which refers to the intermediary zone, the fourth.

Thus it is that the sensual Adam is named Thouth according to the
external patterning. As for the man who is inside Adam, the spiritual
man, he has simultaneously a personal and a universal name. His
personal name I have not learned so far; only indeed Nikotheos the
unmatchable has known it. His universal name is Phos [Light]: hence
the way of calling men Photes.

When Phos was in Paradise breathing in the freshness [the Archon-
tes], instigated by Fate persuaded him, as something harmless and
without after-effect, to put on the body of Adam which came from
their hands, which had issued from Fate, which was formed of the Four
Elements. He, being without guile, did not refuse and they glorified in
the thought that henceforth they held him in slavery.

Indeed the external man is a bond, as Hesiod says, the bond by which
Zeus bound Prometheus. Then, after that bond, Zeus sent him as
another bond Pandora, whom the Hebrews call Eve. In allegorical
terms, Prometheus and Epimetheus compose together a single man:
that is, soul and body. At one moment Prometheus [Man] resembles
the soul, at another lie resembles the intellect, at another the flesh,

ZOSIMOS

333

332 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

because of the refusal of Epimetheus when he refused to listen to his
own [intellect].

In effect the Nous, our god, declares: “The Son of God, who can do
all things and become all things as he wishes, shows himself as he wishes
to each man.”

And up to this day, and on till the end of the world, in secret and
in hidden ways, he comes to those who are his and communicates with
them, counselling them, in secret and by means of their intellect to
separate themselves from their Adam, who blinds them and who
grudges the spiritual and luminous man.

Thus it goes on until there comes the falsely-imitating daimon, who
grudges them and who wants, as before, to send them astray by calling
himself the Son of God, though he is hideous of soul and body. But
they become wiser since they received into themselves him who is
truly Son of God, they deliver over to him their own Adam so that he
may kill him, while they save their luminous spirits for their own home¬
land—there where they were before coming into the world.

But at first, before reaching these audacities, the false imitator, the
jealous one, sends from Persia his precursor who launches out in lying
discourses and who drags men along in the procession of Fate. His
name has nine letters, counting the dipthong as two: which corresponds
to the number in Fate. [The name is Manichaios : Fate is Heimarmene .]
Then, after about Seven Periods, he himself will come in his own nature.

We find all that only among the Jews and in the sacred books of
Hermes, concerning the luminous man and his guide the Son of God,
the terrestrial Adam and his guide the false-imitator, who calls himself
by a blasphemous lie, the Son of God. The Greeks call the terrestrial
Adam Epimetheus, who receives from his intellect [that is, his brother]
the advice not to accept the gifts of Zeus. However after having fallen
repented, and sought the blessed land ... [As for Prometheus, the
intellect] he explains all and advises in all matters those with spiritual
ears. But those with only corporeal ears belong to Fate, for they accept
and admit nothing else.

Those who succeed in timely tinctures assert that there is nothing
outside their art, and mock at the great book on Furnaces, they do not
even heed these words of the Poet (Homer): “So far the gods have
never given to men all good things all together,” and what follows,
and they pay no attention, they do not guard against the ordinary
course of human affairs in the sense that, with regard to a given art,
success is various, various the practise, from the fact that the diversity
of human manners and astral figures make the art in question also
diverse, that one artisan takes the lead, another remains a simple
craftsman, while another remains backward and yet another, still worse,
makes no progress at all.

We see then that in all industries men practise the same art with
tools and methods that differ and show themselves to possess varying
degrees of intelligence and success. But more than in any other it is in
the Sacred Art above all that one can make this statement. Take for
instance the case of a bone-fracture. One finds a bone-setting priest
and he, strong in piety towards the gods, re-sets the bones so well that
one hears a grating noise as the bones fit into one another. If one cannot
find a priest, in order to stop the afflicted man from fearing that he’ll
die, one goes in search of physicians who own books filled with line
drawings shaded in the manner of painters and with all sorts of designs.
Then, according to what the book says, one binds the patient all around
with a dressing, and he lives a long time with his health recovered. So
there is no question of leaving the man to die, just because one didn’t
find a bone-setting priest. But the persons of whom I speak, on
meeting a failure, leave themselves to die of hunger because they didn’t
take the trouble to understand and to realise the “bone-setting” model
of the Furnaces, which would have made them, happy mortals,
triumph over poverty, that incurable evil.

I have omitted some brief Christian interpolations, which disturb
the flow of the argument. 14 The imitative spirit, Antimimos ,
recalls the Counterfeiting Spirit of the Gnostics (considered in
Chapter II); also the Antitheos of the Mazdeans and the cheat
of II Thessalonians (2,4). The precursor from Persia seems
certainly Manichaios (Mani), who died under Bahram I (a.d.
2 y 4 _y 7 ). As for the Seven Periods, Zosimos has drawn these
from the works of the Magousaioi who taught that the life of the
world was divided into seven ages or millennia, each under a
planet of its own and bearing the name of the metal associated
with the planet. We noted this creed at the outset of our inquiry
(in Chapter II). Such Magian views developed into the Jewish-
Christian chiliastic creeds. Lactantius among the Christians in
particular set out the schemes, drawing on a Mazdean source. The
world was to last six thousand years; then the reign of Christ
would be established on earth for a millennium of felicity; in the
eighth millenium the universe would be destroyed and recreated
in a form that would last forever. Lactantius noted with gratifica¬
tion that in this matter pagan wisdom agreed with Christian revela¬
tion, and he specially praised Hystaspes, whom he considered a
“very ancient king of the Medes”, an inspired man. Pie therefore
had no scruples in incorporating passages from The Apokalypse
of Hystaspes into his Institutions.

We may note that the person who is to come after the seven

334 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

periods in Zosimos’ formulation is probably, not the Antimimos
(as the grammar would make us suppose), but the true redeemer,
the Monogenes. In the final passage the hit-or-miss skill of the
priest is compared with the fully-grounded knowledge of the
physician with his books involving both theory and practice.
As for the main sources of Zosimos’ exposition, he himself indi¬
cates them: the work of Nikotheos, various works of Hermes, and
an allegorical exegesis of Genesis. We may add an allegorical work
on Hesiod. Philon of Alexandreia shows us how Hellenised Jews
explained their Bible in highly fanciful and elaborately symbolic

60. Cosmic serpent enclosing Hermopolis

terms; and though the allegorisers worked mainly on Homer
among the ancient poets, Hesiod was not forgotten. 15

After his long introduction, Zosimos says, “But enough on this
point: let’s return to our subject, which concerns apparatus.”
He tells his sister that he feels repugnance, since he cannot hope
to do better than the ancients, yet he’ll submit to his pupil’s
wish and compose his treatise on Furnaces. However, all that
survives is a passage on the alembic. But we may assume that the
following account of tribikos and tube is a part of the promised
treatise. 16

In a treatise called Final Account —apparently the concluding
part of his encyclopedia—Zosimos again sets out his position,
but this time he speaks mainly of tinctures. The full title is The
First Book of the Final Account of 'Zosimos the Theban : some scribe
has perhaps added the name of Thebes as that of a place of

zosimos 335

renown. 17 First comes the letter to his sister on metallurgy in old
Egypt. He goes on:

Some persons then reproach Demokritos and the Ancients for not
having mentioned these two arts, but only those that are termed
noble. This reproach is futile. They could not do it, these men who
were the friends of the Kings of Egypt and who gloried in holding the
first rank in the class of prophets. How could they have openly,
against royal orders, set out in public their knowledge and give others
the sovran power of wealth?

Even if they could have done it, they would not; for they were
careful of their secrets. It was possible only for Jews, secretly, to
operate, write, and publish these things. Indeed we find that Theophilos,
son of Theogenes, has described all the country’s goldmines and we
have Maria’s treatise on Furnaces as well as other writings by Jews.

We see his Egyptian pride again obtruding; also his wish to
enlarge the prestige of his craft by painting the greatness of his
predecessors, the high regard in which they were held. King s
Friend” was an honorific title, often found in the astrologers;
and the rank of prophet was the highest one in the priestly
hierarchy. Bolos in Physika and Mystika speaks of his Fellow-
Prophets. 18 The Hermetic idea of the Prophet is given in Kore
Kosmou :

They are those who learned from Hermes that the atmosphere is filled
with daimons and have engraved it on hidden stelai.

They are those who alone, instructed by Hermes of the secret
ordinances of God, have made themselves for humanity the initiators
and legislators of the arts, sciences, and craft-activities of all sorts.

They are those who, having learned from Hermes that things below
have received from the Demiurge the order-of-being in sympathy with
those above, have instituted on earth the sacred functions linked

vertically with the mysteries of heaven.

They are those, who, having recognised the corruptibility of bodies,
have ingeniously created the perfected excellence in all matters of the
prophets, so that never is a prophet, destined to lift his hands to the
gods, ignorant of any of the beings—and so that philosophy and magic
may nourish the soul, and medicine cure the body when afflicted with
any ill. 19

Zosimos continues with his account of tinctures:

But neither Jews nor Greeks have ever made public timely tinctures.
These tinctures, indeed, the Jews deposit in the [treasuries] where they
put their riches, giving them to divine images to guard. As for the

ZOSIMOS

337

336 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

treatment of minerals, which differs much from timely tinctures, they
do not show themselves at all as jealous—because this art cannot but
show itself outwardly and whoever tries to practise it [cannot] remain
without punishment. If in effect a man is caught digging a mine by the
inspectors of State Manufactures on account of royal revenues ... or
because furnaces cannot be hidden away, while timely tinctures are
carried on quite out of view. That’s why you don’t see that any of the
ancients has published secretly or openly, anything whatever on the
subject. In the whole series of the ancients, I have found only
Demokritos making allusion to it.. .

It is clear that formerly, in the time of Hermes, these tinctures were
called natural, as they had to be described in terms of the general title
of the book called Book of Natural Tinctures, dedicated to Isidoros. But
when they became the object of the jealousy of the daimons of the
flesh, they became timely tinctures and took over that name. Still,
reproaches are made to the ancients, and above all to Hermes, for not
having published them, secretly or openly, and for making no allusion
to them.

Only Demokritos has set them out in his work and mentioned them.
And as for them [the ancient Egyptians], they engraved them on their
stelai in the darkness and depths of the temples in symbolic characters
—both the tinctures and the chorography of Egypt—so that, even
though one carried boldness to the point of penetrating into those
dark depths, if one had neglected to learn the key, one could not
decipher the characters for all one’s boldness and trouble.

. The J ews > then > imitating the Egyptians, deposited the timely
tinctures in their subterranean chambers together with their formulas
of initiation; and they set down this warning in their testaments: “If
you find my treasures, leave the gold to those who desire their own
ruin; but if you find out how to understand the characters, you will
gather all the wealth again in a short while. On the other hand, if you
take only the wealth, you will go to your ruin because of the jealousy of
kings, and not only of kings, but of all men .” 20

These passages give us another reason why the alchemists were
so secretive. The harping on the “jealousy of kings” reminds us
of the probable persecution under Diocletian; under either the
Ptolemies or the Romans anyone known to be dedicated to
goldmaking was sure to attract the unwelcome attention of the
authorities and be exposed to ridicule and persecution.

There are then two kinds of timely tinctures. One of them, that of
stuffs, the daimons who watch over every place have handed over to
their own priests. That is why, besides, they are called timely, because
they operate according to the timely moments through the will of the

supposed daimons; and when the daimons cease from giving their
assent [they fail to operate]. . . .

The other kind of timely tinctures, that of genuine and natural
tinctures, were set down by Hermes on the stelai: “Melt down the sole
thin g which may be greenish yellow, red, sun-colour, pale green,
yellow of ochre, green verging on black, and the rest.” As for the earths
themselves, Hermes has called them with a secret name, “sands”, and
has revealed the kinds of colours. These tinctures act naturally, but
they are grudged by the terrestrial daimons. However, if anyone, after
being initiated, drives the daimons away, he will obtain the sought-for
result.

How far Zosimos was really worried about daimons and how far
he is using allegorical language is hard to say. The comment about
the timely tinctures being “handed over to the priests” whom the
daimons serve, suggests some sort of rivalry between the al¬
chemists and the priesthood—though how it could operate is not
clear. Timely Tinctures, in their opposition to Natural Ones, cer¬
tainly mean those operations carried out according to astrologic
systems which determined the correct time and place of work.
We are reminded of Iamblichos’ remark about the Egyptians
refusing to “carry anything out except at the exigency of a timely
movement”. There he is apparently giving this attitude the
authority of Hermes and Bitys, two of Zosimos’ mentors; but he
may be citing those thinkers, not for the particular point he has
just made, but for the general Egyptian scheme of the cosmos
he has been outlining:

There is among them another hegemony of all the elements diffused in
generation and forces residing in it: four female forces and four male
forces. This hegemony belongs to the sun. And there is another
principle of universal nature existing in generation that is attributed to
the moon. Dividing the heaven into two, four, a dozen, thirty-six parts,
or double that, or in some other number of some sort of parts, they put
at the head of these, hegemonies more or less numerous. But above all
is set the One that is their superior. And thus among the Egyptians the
procedure is to start from above, from the principles down to the last
beings, while giving to them all the one as Origin. Everything ends in
a multitude of beings ruled by a One, and indeterminate nature is
governed by a determinate measure that is the supreme unity. . . . 21

Zosimos seems to dislike the astrologic schemes as expressive
of determinism and the rule of Fate. Sometimes, he has said, the
calculations come off and convince their adherents; then they fail.
What he wants is a complete unity of theory and practice; and

339

33 8 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

this it seems is embodied in what he calls Natural Tinctures. For
such operations were achieved by making the laboratory work
reflect and repeat the actual processes of nature in their fullness.
By “natural” then he means, not “carried out by nature”, but
“carried out in the same way as nature”. He goes on about the
daimons , who, in their pestering ways, have some analogy with the
watchful inspectors who prosecute the infringers of State rights
and controls.

Thus then the watchful daimons, once repelled by the powerful men of
old, resolved to take control of the Natural Tinctures in our stead, so
as to be no longer chased off by men, but to receive their prayers, to be
invoked by them, and to be regularly nourished by their sacrifices.
That is then what they did. They hid all the natural procedures, which
acted through themselves, not only because they were jealous of men,
but also because they were concerned with their own subsistence, so
as not to be whipped, chased out, and killed with hunger through
receiving no more sacrifices.

This is what they did. They hid the natural tincture and introduced
in its place their non-natural tincture, and they handed these procedures
on to their priests, and, if the village-folk neglected the sacrifices, they
prevented them from succeeding even in the non-natural tincture. All
those then who learned the so called doctrine of the daimons of the
time fabricated waters, and, by reason of custom, law, and fear, their
sacrifices multiplied.

However, the daimons did not fulfil even the false promises that they
had made. But when there had resulted a complete change-round of
the klimata [meaning unclear here, apparently some matter of astrolo¬
gical zoning] and the region was devastated by war and the human
race disappeared from it. 22 When the temples of daimons were nothing
but a desert and their sacrifices were neglected, they began to flatter
the surviving men and persuaded them by dream, on account of their
falsity, and by many presages, to adhere to the sacrifices. And as they
renewed their false promises of non-natural tinctures, all the unhappy
men, devoted to pleasure and ignorant, were filled with rejoicing.

They want to do all this to you too, woman, through the interven¬
tion of their pseudo-prophet. These local daimons flatter you; for they
hunger not only for sacrifices but also for your soul.

Clearly Theosebeia has come under the influence of alchemists
whose methods are considered wrong-headed by Zosimos.
Hence his long diatribe. We could make more sense of his remarks
if we knew better just what he means by the Tinctures. He sug¬
gests a considerable amount of work being done on them;

ZOSIMOS

6i. Cosmic serpent, two-headed

perhaps, however, he is speaking of a particular area, presumably
that of Panopolis. For, after using general terms, he comes down
to a single region which has had a very bad time and been almost
depopulated. He infers that both the villagers and the priests had a
strong interest in the manufactures connected with the tinctures,
and that the methods of which he disapproves were linked with
particular cults, which profited from the work being done by their
devotees. His language suggests the local gods of the Egyptian
nomes, but the general tone of his protest implies gods involved
in the astrologic systems. It is quite possible that the region of
Panopolis, which lay downstream from Thebes, Dendera,
Abydos, in Upper Egypt, had suffered from warfare not long
before 300. In 172 there had been the revolt of the Boukoloi,
native auxiliary troops stationed in the Delta. An Egyptian
priest Isidoros led the revolt, which was marked by a fierce
nationalist feeling. Further, the social and economic crisis that set
in in the mid-jrd century led to a weakening of military controls,
and there were incursions of desert-nomads, Libyans and Blem-
myes. The latter had appeared in the Thebaid, it seems, from
253; the prefect-usurpator organised an expedition against them
about 260. And Firmus, who occupied Egypt (probably in the
name of the Palmyrene princes) was allied with the Blemmyes,
who figured in the 274 triumph of Aurelian. Worse, under
Probus, these tribesmen made a fresh attack and reached as far
as Ptolemais, not far upstream from Panopolis, where the rebel¬
lious townsfolk welcomed them. Between the years 258 and 294

34° ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

ZOSIMOS

341

we do not have a single dated ostrakon that comes certainly from
the Theban region. 23 There is thus every reason to think that
some areas around Panopolis, especially perhaps those nearer to
Thebes, had been badly hit by incursions of the Blemmyes in the
later 3rd century; and this fact helps us to fix the date of Zosimos
round 300 or the early 4th century.

That other alchemists with rival claims were at work nearby
is shown by Zosimos’ appeal to his sister cited above. Again
in On the Treatment of Magnesia he writes, “My blessed girl, turn
away from the useless principles of those who confuse your ears.
I have heard that you’re in converse with the virgin Paphnoutia
and other uneducated persons; and you attempt to put into
practice the useless and empty fables that you hear among them.”
Of these opponents of his he names also “Neilos, your priest”. 24
Unless the phrase is used ironically, here is further evidence that
the priests played a leading part in the tincturings that Zosimos
disliked. He now makes a final call on his sister, setting out his
ideal alchemist.

Then do not let yourself be drawn this way and that, like a woman, as
I have already told you in my book According to Energy. Do not be
agitated off in all directions in the quest of God, but remain seated at
your hearth and God will come to you—he who is everywhere and who
is not limited to the lowest space like the daimons. In this calm repose
of body, lull to repose also your passions, greed, pleasure, anger,
chagrin, and the dozen lots [moirai\ of death. And so, correcting your¬
self, call the divinity to you and it will truly come—it being what is
everywhere and nowhere.

Then, without even being invited to do it, offer sacrifices to the
daimons, not those who profit from them [the false alchemists], not
those who nourish and comfort them, but those who chase them off
and make them disappear, those whose formula Mambres gave to
Solomon King of Jerusalem, and those who that Solomon himself has
written out of his own wisdom. By acting in this way, you will gain
the genuine timely and natural tinctures. Do all this until you attain
perfection of soul. And when you realise that you’ve been made perfect,
then, having gained the natural tinctures, spit upon matter, find your
refuge with Poimandres, and, having received the baptism of the Krater,
hurry on to rejoin your own people.

I now come however to the task that Your Imperfection sets me. But
I must first expatiate a little more and consider afresh the object of our
inquiry. I must not show myself inferior and the theme is one that is
easy to get out of focus.

This eloquent passage makes clear further why and how Zosimos
dislikes those who seek magical methods of compulsion, formulas
or procedures for seeking out a deity. His moral and philosophic
position implies a similar sort of patience and acceptance in deal¬
ing with the processes of matter. There must be no forcing of
conclusions, no attempts to find short-cuts. The alchemist must
learn by a total acceptance of the phenomena and of their systems
of inner organisation or dynamic transformation. If he has any
use for magic, it is in a wholly negative sense: in order to drive
away all outward interferences of man or spirit. His Mambres
may be a transcription of Memra (The Word of God personified:
Mmra or Mambres), but is more likely a form of Iambres, whom
we noted above as one of the Egyptian wizards opposing Moses.
There was a considerable apocryphal literature of Solomon, to
whom exorcisms were particularly attributed. 25 Zosimos, we see,
knows the Hermetic Poimandres and accepts the idea of the
krater- baptism. 26 The ironic use of the form of address. Your
Imperfection, suggests that fully initiated alchemists formally
called one another Your Perfection.

After the “above passage there is a gap. He apparently cited
Hermes; for he goes on, “Listen what he says soon after: The two
Eggs, having been drunk down, are only a simple thing, which
has become diverse, with one part humid and cold, another part
dry and cold, and these two make up only a single work.” Then
after repeating, “But now I come to the assigned task,” he deals
with processes of timely tincturing, one by raw tincture, the
other by cooking. The second kind he subdivides according to the
liquids used (water or wine) or the furnaces or the duration and
strength of the fires.” He concludes, “These tinctures are then the
faculty of corrupting a large quantity as well as a small one, in
the sense that one obtains them as well in glass furnaces [?] as
in large or little crucibles, and in various apparatus by means of
fires and through the force of fires. Experience is what will prove

62. Ouroboros on a magical gem (with inscription IAOABRASAX)

342 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

it together with uprightness in all matters of the soul. As for the
demonstration of the fires and all the things in question, you have
them in The Tetter Omega. It is from this point then that I am going
to begin, purple-adorned woman.” 27

He here brings out succinctly how the ascetic way of life, reject¬
ing all the lures of the world, is seen as only the other side of the
intellectual and technical struggle to strip material process down
to its essentials. The devoted concentration of the alchemist is
one aspect of experimental work which includes the discovery
of the pure pattern of change and development. 28

MORE ON ZOSIMOS 357

denounced the empirical school that had grown up in Egypt.
But though he clearly had a strong nationalist feeling, he admired
and used the work of Maria the Jewess. In him the alchemy of the
ancient world reached its height. His insistence on the unity of
theory and practice does not seem to have long survived him.
The further history of Greek alchemy is almost wholly one of
repetition and of rhetorical exploitation of the previous gains,
with a weakening grasp of practice . 11

66. Scorpion-goddess Serquet in her serpent-boat propelled by a

crocodile

The Later Greek Alchemists

The apex of Greek alchemy was reached with Zosimos: the fullest
development of combined theory and practice. No doubt a
certain amount of practical work was done after his period and
various recipes added to the repertory; but it seems clear that
nothing of any importance was discovered and no extension of
theory made. More and more the exponents turned to glorifica¬
tions of the art in a lofty rhetoric in which the paradoxes and
antitheses of the alchemic idiom were exploited for their own sake.
The practical side shifted more to Syria. However, to complete
our picture we had better glance at the names that now come up.

We have seen abundantly how one side of alchemy linked with
the many esoteric or mystery cults of the epoch, with the whole
vast development of magic and theurgy. In those cults and rites
there had been uttered the enormous despair of the masses of the
Hellenistic and Roman periods, the desperate sense of being
cornered in a hopeless situation, together with an endlessly
revived attempt to break through into a new life, whether through
the lonely incantations of the magician, the resistances of isolated
groups such as the Gnostics, or the large-scale struggle to affirm
a total opposition to the “World” (the existing State-form, the
cash-nexus, and all the forms of class-division) in a creed like
early Christianity.

It is indeed of interest to note the several points of likeness in
that creed and in the alchemic outlook. There were many aspects
of the secret cult among early Christians. Origen was still able to
declare to Celsus, Then, and not till then, we invite them to our
mysteries, \teletai \; for we speak wisdom among the perfect
[teleioi, initiated].” He echoed what Paul had said, “But we speak
God’s wisdom in mystery, the concealed wisdom, which God
ordained before the Aions into our glory, which none of the
Archons of this Aion [Rulers of this Period] knew; for if they had

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS 359

known, they had not crucified the lord of glory.” Among the
Gnostics, the perfect or initiated formed a higher group, of whom
much was said by the Christian attackers of heretics. Mark states,
“Unto you is given the mystery of the kingdom of God; but unto
them that are without, all things are done in parables: that seeing
they may see and not perceive.” Matthew certainly referred to
secret instruction: “Nought is covered that shall not be revealed,
and hidden that shall not be known. What I tell you in the dark¬
ness, speak you in the light; and what you hear in the ear, pro¬
claim from the housetops.” 1

We seem to hear there the tones of triumph of the section that
wanted to break through the original secret cult and proclaim
its message abroad.

Further, Christians developed the Last Supper into an act of
communion in which ordinary substances, bread and wine, were
thought to be transmuted, by the effects of ritual speech and action,
into divine substances, the actual flesh of the Saviour, which the
worshipper consumed. Behind such a rite was a long series of
communions in religions of the mystery-type, which gave the
devotee the conviction of becoming one with the god, a Bacchos
of Bacchos, and so on, and which went back in origin to the
tribal ceremonies of eating the totem (which was of one flesh
with the tribe) on special occasions. But in the Christian eucharist
the primitive kind of communion-meal was made far more precise
in its idiom: the substances were conceived as undergoing a
process of transformation. Here we see a clear imprint of the
alchemic idea in its elixir-form.The term eucharist seems estab¬
lished by the time of the Didache, which implies it as a sacrifice.
St Ignatios calls the eucharist “the breaking of one bread, which
is the medicine of immortality, the antidote against dying”.
The idiom is exactly that of Kleopatra in her Discourse, where she
speaks of the medicine of life. Again we are told, “Those who
deny the gift of God, by their disputing come to death. But it
would be far better for them to keep the agape [the love-feast] so
that they may rise again.” 2 The eucharist was an immortalising
pharmakon. God’s power was thought to take up its dwelling
in the consumer of Christ’s body; hence the phrase, “We thank
you that you are Mighty.” Jesus became in the patristic tradition
the Great Doctor, Our Great Doctor. “He treats them by the
process of a sublime medicine.” 3

360 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

Following Zosimos in the later 4th century there seem to have
come several lesser figures such as Pelagios, Dioskoros, Synesios.
Pelagios the Ancient cites Zosimos as well as the dictum about
wheat producing wheat, gold producing gold. Dioskoros seems
to have been a priest of the great temple of Sarapis at Alexandreia;
Synesios addressed to him his Commentary on Demokritos. 4
This Synesios has been identified with the Neoplatonic friend of
the astronomer Hypatia, who finally became bishop of Ptolemais
in Kyrenaika. If the identification is correct, Synesios was an alche¬
mist in his youthful days; for he was born about 365-70 and the
Sarapieion was destroyed in 390—though it is barely possible that
he was wridng to a man who had been a priest of the temple in
the past and that he deliberately ignored the destruction. He was in
fact an eclectic in his beliefs and had his bishopric thrust on him not
long before 409; he accepted it rather as a social duty than because
of any religious urge. “Philosophy is all I am equal to,” he said in
dismay. He was certainly interested in the science of his period.
A letter of his to Hypatia has the first known reference to an
areameter; he wrote a treatise on dream-interpretation—on the
alchemic side we may recall the treatise at the beginning of the
St Mark manuscript as well as the recipes for procuring dreams in
the Leyden Papyrus. In On Providence he tells an historical tale of
administrative oppression and the fall of Gainas in terms of
Egyptian mythology. He sets out the doctrine of pneuma and
universal sympathies in arguing for the legitimacy of divination;
and in Dion he puts the prophets Hermes and Zoroaster beside
the Christian hermits Amous and Antonios as representing the
supreme heights of wisdom. His hymns are full of Neoplatonic
and Gnostic touches; he cries in true alchemic idiom, “You are
father, you are mother, you are male, you are female, you are
voice and you are silence, you are the nature producing nature.” 5

There is thus nothing in the character of the man that precludes
a certain dabbling in alchemy. But apart from the difficulty about
the Sarapieion, the work of the alchemist Synesios is dry in
style, quite lacking the sophisticated elegance of Synesios of
Ptolemais. It also lacks his careful modesty. In the dialogue the
author sets out his opinions authoritatively, with his audience, a
priest, grovelling in admiration. “You have excellently settled
the problem, philosopher.” “You have spoken well.” 6 We may
then conclude it is unlikely that he was our historical figure.
Another possible claimant for the dialogue is the Synesios of

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS 361

Philadelphia, a Lydian, His son Androkleides taught at the time
of Porphyrios, who attacked him as one of the empodoi technologoi —
a difficult phrase: empodos means “obstructive, causing difficulties”
and technologos means a “writer on the art of rhetoric, one who lays
down the rules”. Presumably the Souda, from which the phrase
comes, meant that he was a severe over-systematiser. As profes¬
sions often went from father to son, the father Synesios was most
likely also a rhetorician of some kind; and the connection of the
son with Porphyrios suggests that the family lived in Egypt.
However, the details are too meagre to lead to any conclusion. 7

With the 5th century we come to Olympiodoros. In this case
there seems no doubt that the alchemist was a known literary
figure, who wrote a history of his own times. A native of Thebes
in Egypt, he took part in an embassy to Attila under Honorius
in 412; travelled among the Blemmyes in South Egypt and visited
the priests of Isis at Philai, where pagan survivals persisted till
562. Photios called him poietes, poet in the original sense of maker
—here alchemic operator; poiesis was a synonym for the great
work. To him was attributed Olympiodoros the Philosopher to
Petasios King of Armenia on the Divine and Sacred Art —which is
also called in other manuscripts. Commentary on the Book of Energy
of Zosimos and on the Sayings of Hermes and the Philosophers. The work
is worth citing at some length to show the ruminative tone, with
its effort to think back over the whole scene of Greek philosophy
and to find just where alchemy came in and developed out of the
main body of thought. 8

Fire is the primary agent, that of the whole art. It is the first of the
four elements. Indeed the enigmatic language of the ancients as to the
four elements refers to the art. Let your virtue examine with care
the Books of Demokritos on the four elements. It’s a matter of Physics.
He speaks sometimes of gentle fire, sometimes of violent fire, and of
charcoal and all that has need of fire. Then of air, of all that derives
from air, animals that live in the air. Likewise of water, of the bile of
fishes, of all that’s prepared with fishes and water. Again he speaks of
earth and of what is attached to it, salts, metals, plants. He separates
and classifies each of these objects, according to colour, specific
characteristics and sex, male or female. Knowing that, all the ancients
veiled the art under multiplicity of words.

The art indeed has complete need of these data; without them nothing
is sure. Demokritos has said we can constitute nothing without them.
Know then that I have written as well as my strength allowed, being
feeble not only in discourse but also in spirit. And I ask you for your

362 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

prayers to deter divine justice from being wrathful against me for
having the boldness to write this work, and to bring it to be propitious
to me in all ways.

The writings of the Egyptians, their poesies, their doctrines, the
oracle of the daimons, the exposition of the prophets, all treat the
same subject. . .

Prove now your sagacity. Many names have been used for the
Divine Water. That Water denotes what one seeks, and one has hidden
the object of the quest under the name Divine Water. I am going to
set out for you a little argument. Listen, you in possession of every
virtue; for I know the torch of your thought and the tutelary good. I
want to set before your eyes the spirit of the ancients. Philosophers,
they held to its language and came to the art by way of wisdom,
without harming philosophy in the least; they have all written clearly!
In that they have been false to their oath; for their writings deal with
doctrine and not with practical works.

In what follows it must be remembered that the Greek word
arche means both “beginning” and “principle”, since the quest
for cosmic origins in the Ionian philosophers had involved a
quest for the first element or substance from which things arose;
this element was the principle of the cosmos. 9

Some of the natural philosophers bring back the argument on the
elements to the arche, in view of the fact that archai are something more
general than the elements. Indeed the first principle resumes the whole
of the art. Thus Agathodaimon, placing the arche in the end and the
end in the arche, wants it to be the serpent Ouroboros . . . That is
evident, O initiated . . .

Agathodaimon, what is he? Some hold he is an ancient, one of
the oldest persons who occupied themselves with philosophy in
Egypt- Others have called him the Heavens—perhaps because the
serpent is the image of the universe. Indeed certain Egyptian hiero-
glyphics, wanting to trace the world on obelisks or express it in sacred
characters, show the serpent Ouroboros. His body is constellated with
stars. That is, I ve been told, because he is the arche . Such is the view
set out in The Book of Chemia, where his figure is drawn.

I see now how it happens that the arche is something more universal
than the elements. Let s state what is for us an element and at the same
time what is the arche.

The four elements are the principle of the body; but every principle
is not therefore an element. Indeed the Divine, the Egg, the Inter¬
mediary, the Atoms are for certain persons the archai of things; but
these are not elements.

Let s seek then, according to certain signs, what is the principle of

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS 3^3

things. Is it one or multiple? Is it unique, immobile, infinite, or
determined? Are there several archai. If there are several archai, the
same questions come up. Are they immobile, determined, infinite?

He then begins a catalogue of the early philosophers with their
views on arche, origin and principle. We need not discuss here
how right or wrong he is in the details of his assessment. What is
striking is the dismissal of the notion of some immobile substance
or god as the ultimate basis, though immobility or unchangeability
had been regarded as the most desirable and noble condition that
could be imagined by so many thinkers, early or late. Plato’s
Ideas were set outside the world of change or motion; Aristotle s
God was the great Unmoved and there was circular movement
but no change in the spheres above the moon in his universe.
However, against the whole metaphysical current of ancient
thought, Olympiodoros, speaking for the alchemists, declares that
reality consists of “movement and rest”—that is, these united
opposites make up the real world. We see then to some extent
why the alchemist tradition attached itself to Demokritos, the
outstanding example among those thinkers of whom we saw
Aristotle protesting angrily, “They say there is always movement.

67. Later alchemic imagery: the Green Lion devouring the Sun (from
The Rosary of Philosophers)

364 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

The ancients admired one principle of all things, unique, immobile,
and infinite. Thales of Miletos speaks of the Egg [a confusion or perhaps
a deliberate play on words here between egg, don, and being, on]. It’s
a question of the divine water and of gold: it’s a principle, beautiful,
immobile. It’s exempt from all apparent movement, and more, it is
infinite, endowed with infinite power, and no one can number its
powers.

Parmenides also takes for principle the divine, unique principle,
immobile with determined power; it is, he says, immobile, and the
energy that derives from it is determinate.

We note that Thales of Miletos, considering the existence of God,
calls him infinite and endowed with infinite power; God is endowed
with an infinite power. Parmenides says that for his productions God
has only a determinate power; indeed it is throughout clear that what
God produces corresponds to a limited power. Perishable thin g.;
correspond to a limited power—though not so intellectual things.

These two men, I mean Thales and Parmenides, seem to be rejected
by Aristode from the band of natural philosophers. Indeed they are
theologians concerned with questions alien to physics and they attach
themselves to [concepts of] immobility. But all physical things move.
Nature is the principle of movement and rest.

He then goes on to discuss the ideas held by the early thinkers
about the arche as original and fundamental substance, stressing
the aspect of movement.

Thales admitted water as an unique, determined arche of things since
it is fecund and plastic: fecund as giving birth to fish, plastic as taking
any form one wants to give it. It takes the form of any vase in which
it’s put, whether the vase is polished, terracotta, triangular, quad¬
rangular, or what you like. This arche is mobile. Water indeed moves;
it is determinate and not eternal.

Diogenes held that the arche is air, which is rich and fecund: it
engenders birds. And it shows itself plastic, taking any form it is given.
But it is one, mobile, and not eternal.

■Herakleitos and Hippasos have taken fire as the arche of all things,
since it’s the active element of all things. An arche indeed should be
the source of the activity of things issued from it. As some say, fire
is also fecund, since animals are born in warmth.

As for the earth, no one has made an arche of it except Xenophanes
of Kolophon. As it is not fecund, no one has made an element of it.
And he who is in possession of every virtue [the interlocutor here]
remarks that earth is not signalled as an element by philosophers, since
it isn’t fecund. Indeed Hermes associates the idea of earth with that
of the unimpregnated virgin. 10

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS 365

Anaximenes declares that arche of things, infinite and mobile, is air.
He argues thus: air is the neighbour of the incorporeal and we enjoy
its efflux. It must be infinite as it produces without losing anything.

Anaximandros says the arche is the Intermediary: that which
denotes moist vapour and smoke; the moist vapour is intermediary
between fire and earth; in brief it is the intermediate between the hot
and the moist. Smoke is intermediate between hot and dry.

Let’s come to the opinion of each ancient and see how he seeks to
direct his teaching according to his viewpoint. Here and there an
omission is to be found as the result of the complexity of the discourses.

And now let’s recapitulate by groups and show how our philo¬
sophers, borrowing from those others their point of departure, have
built up our Art of Nature.

Zosimos, crown of philosophers, whose language has the abundance
of Ocean, the new Divine one, follows in general Melissos on the art
and says that the art is one like God. That is what he sets out to Theo-
sebeia in countless places, and what he says is true.

Here he repeats the advice which we saw Zosimos gives to his
sister: words of pantheist quietism, which reflect the deep patience
and acceptance of reality that has to go with the active quest into
the principles of natural process. Taken together with the argu¬
ments of Zosimos, these statements of Olympiodoros bring out
clearly the points where the alchemists differed from all other
ancient thinkers. They alone combined an essentially materialist
outlook with a deep faith in the creative force, the formative
pattern, working out in natural process, of which they saw man a
part—and then went on to seek in a laboratory, in scientific
experiment, for the precise ways in which the force, the living
pattern, expressed itself. The fantasy-aspects of their thought
cannot detract from the essential drive and purpose in their work,
cannot obscure the great new synthesis at which they were arriv¬
ing. The early Stoics and Epikoureans were inspired by some¬
thing of the same sort of pantheist materialism, but they could
not make the decisive step from trying to evolve the laws of life
and matter out of their minds alone, the step into active experi¬
mental verification.

He exhorts us to seek our refuge in the one God. He speaks thus to
the woman philosopher. Remain seated at your hearth, recognising
that there is one god and one art. Do not agitate yourself this way and
that in seeking for another God. God himself will come to you, he
who is everywhere and who is not confined in a lowermost space like
the daimon. Motionless of body, immobilise also your passions. And

366 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

thus, having corrected yourself by your own action, summon the deity
and it will come truly to you, it which is everywhere. And when you
have recognised yourself, then you’ll recognise also him who is really
God. Operating in this way, you’ll obtain the genuine and natural
tinctures, spitting on matter.

Similarly Chymes follows Parmenides and declares: One is All, by
it All is, for if it did not contain All, All would be Nothing.

The theologians speak on divine matters as the natural philosophers
on matter. 11

Agathodaimon, inclined towards Anaximenes, sees the absolute in
air. Anaximandros said that this absolute was the intermediate which
is moist vapour and smoke. For Agathodaimon it is altogether sub¬
limated vapour \aithak, often used for mercury in a volatile state].
Zosimos and most of the others have followed this opinion, when
they constructed the philosophy of our art.

Hermes also speaks of smoke in connection with magnesia. Separate
them, he says, in front of the furnace. . . . The smoke of the magnesia
being white, whitens bodies. Smoke is intermediate between hot and
dry, and here is placed the sublimated vapour and that that results
from it. Moist vapour is intermediate between the hot and the moist;
it denoted the sublimated moist vapours, those that alembics and their
like distil.

As well as Hermes, Agathodaimon, and Zosimos, he names Maria
the Jewess and Synesios. Though he refers to the authority of the
Bible, which he seems to know very little, he has nothing notice¬
ably Christian about his work, whereas he refers to the oracles
of Apollo and those of the lesser daimones, invokes the Muses, and
mentions the inscriptions in the temple of Isis. The Tomb of
Osiris is his image of alchemy. He seems then to be at heart a
pagan, cherishing the Egyptian tradition. He repeats the old tale
of gold being engendered in the land of Ethiopia. “There a kind
of ant extracts the gold and brings it up to the daylight and
delights in it.” 12 He cites the Ptolemaic libraries and uses Egyptian
names for months, Mecheir and Mesore, which he relates to the
four-month systems of summer and winter. He also repeats
Zosimos on the role of Egyptian kings. 13

He is still interested in practical work. He speaks of maceration,
washing, roasting of minerals, and distinguishes volatile and
fixed bodies:

The ancients admit three tinctures. The first is that which promptly
disappears [volatilises], like sulphur and arsenic [not in the literal
sense]. The second is that which fades out slowly, like sulphurous

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS 3^7

materials. The third, that which does not fade at all: these are the
metals, the stones, and the earth. The first tincture, made with arsenic,
tints copper with white. Arsenic is a kind of sulphur that quickly
volatilises; all that is like arsenic grows volatile through fire and is
called sulphurous matter. 11

He adds, “Mercury whitens all, draws out the souls of all, changes
colour, and survives.”

Olympiodoros is intelligent, but lacks the fervour of Maria and
Zosimos. The growth of Christianity in the 4th and 5 th century
led to considerable disorders and confusions. Many philosophers
were murdered. We saw how Hypatia fell early a victim to the
monks. Alchemy, with its deep pagan roots visible in Zosimos
and Olympiodoros, must have been highly suspect, and many of
its practitioners must have suffered death or persecution. I he
atmosphere of the period is powerfully brought out in an account
written in Boharean, with the inscription, Bnkomion [_ panegyric]
mitten by our Patriarch, our Holy Archbishop of Alexandria, Saint
Dioskoros. (Dioskoros we have met in relation with Synesios as
the name of a priest of Sarapis. In a demotic spell-book we find
it cited as a name of power, “Pronounce this name on the prow
of a boat when it is going to sink to the bottom, and because of the
names of Dioskoros which are there, it will be saved.”) 15 There
was an Egyptian martyr Dioskoros, commemorated on 18 May,
another killed at Alexandreia under Decius and commemorated
on 14 December: the Patriarch was dated 454 and commemorated
on both 4 September and 14 October. 16

To the west of the water there was a town where dwelt the servants
of the idol named Kothos. The idol was set up in the niche of a house,
and when they crossed the doorway of the house, they bowed their

heads before it and worshipped it.

The town’s priests arrived and told their Father all that the pagans
did to them: that they tried to catch little Christian children as sacri¬
fices for their god Kothos; they laid snares for them, and when they d
got once hold of them, they maltreated them, they sought out Christian
children to sacrifice on the altar of their gods. Also, when caught,
jailed, and interrogated, they had confessed without being put to the
torture- “Yes we make little Christian children come, we lure them
with gifts of bits of bread and a handful of food, and then we shut
them up in hidden places so that no one outside can hear their voices.
Then we kill them, we pour their blood on the altar, we take their gut
and string it like cords on our guitars, and we play music in honour

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS

368 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

of our gods. We bum their bodies and spread the ashes on places
where we know treasures are buried, and we take up as much of them
as we wish.”

However the arrested persons have had recourse to ways of corrup¬
tion and been saved, because the chiefs of this district are greedy for
money.

68 . The Alchemical Assumption (from The Rosary )

There was, of course, no human sacrifice in Egypt, and it is more
than unlikely that the pagans would have reverted to such prac¬
tices when they were under special scrutiny and attack. The
Christians themselves had earlier been accused of cannibalism and
incest; and they later were to accuse Jews of the very same
villainies as they now laid at the doors of the pagans.

When the holy bishop, the Apa Makar, heard this from his priests,
he rose and went with them. We set out with him, I and two men of
high rank; and two priests went with us. When we had traversed some
five miles on the lower part of their territory, we saw their temple.
My father went that way, but the two priests cried, “Father, let’s go
away so that they won’t kill us.”

He replied, “As our saviour lives, even if they kill me, I won’t give
way till I enter here.” And he went to the temple-door.

Then the demon who dwelt by the door and the idol Kothos cried

369

out, “Go and hunt Makarios out of Tkou.” Fear gripped us when we
heard his voice. If the fear had held us a moment more, we’d have gone
away, we’d not have returned there, nor should we have come back
to our homes to see you.

When the pagan priests heard that, they came out of the door with
arms, javelins and axes in their hands; and the women climbed on the
temple-roof to throw stones at us. They shouted at Makarios,
“Makarios, you are the criminal of Tkou. Why have you come and
what do you want here? Our gods have warned us of your hate. Go
back to your own place. What have you to do with us?”

The saint replied, “If I have nothing to do with you, what have you
to do with the children of Christians that you sacrifice to the idols?”

They said, “It isn’t true.”

The saint then said, “Won’t you let me enter and see the temple?”

They answered, “Come in.”

However the two priests were scared and didn’t enter.

Then twenty men rose up, closed the doors behind us, and prepared
to kill us. We were only four, and they shouted at us, “Your life is
finished today. The moment of your death is upon you.”

At once they threw themselves on my Father, seized him first as a
spotless lamb, and then us three. The pagans rose up and set us as
offerings on the altar of their god Kothos, and the women rejoiced,
crying, “Let us glorify our god today with these Christian criminals.”

However the chief among them said, “We must refer the matter to
our highpriest before killing them and we must call him here about the
sacrifice to our god Kothos.”

The others agreed with him. Homeros was the name of their high¬
priest. They sent a man out to find him. I said to my Father, “You are
seated here without praying for our preservation. Come, the hour of
our death is here.”

My Father answered, “Don’t be afraid, my son Tonoution. Christ
will aid us.”

And at those very words the holy Apa Besa knocked on the door;
and as no one answered, he cried out, “Great all-powerful God who
drew Peter out of prison, unfettering his hands and feet and making the
door open before him, so that the guards didn’t hold him back and
the soldiers watching at the door were asleep and the angel of the
Lord followed and led him out by the door of iron giving access to
the town—make this temple open of its own accord.” At that instant
the temple-door opened and the holy saint Besa entered with monks
to the number of forty.

When they entered, the pagans were scared. They were like soulless
stones. We were at once freed from our bonds and the holy Apa Besa
said to my Father, “Let us both get to work. You make a fire and I’ll
pray—or you pray and I’ll make a fire.”

37 1

37° ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

My Father replied, “No, let us stand up together, one by the other,
let’s pray together that fire descends and burns this temple.”

And standing there the two prayed until a voice from on high was
heard, “Save yourselves by the temple-door.”

Before we had even turned our heads, a great wall of fire surrounded
the whole temple and its walls crumbled away and the fire consumed
it all right down to the foundations. My Father cursed the temple,
saying, “Let no tree yielding shade ever grow in this place. Let it -
become the dwelling-place of wildbeasts and reptiles of the earth.”

Then a foul demon entered flying into a man, who ran off into the
town, howling, “Let all the pagans flee. Besa and Makarios of Tku are
there.”

My Father then met Homeros, their leading man, on the road. He
was the highpriest and my Father knew in his heart that he was the
chief they’d sent for. He said, “When they prepared to slit our throats
and kill us, why didn’t you come to glorify your god Kothos?”

He answered, “You’re not a fit sacrifice for our god, you’re an old
man.”

Then my Father made a sign to the Brethren. “Seize and bind him .”

And this noisome priest cried, “Great god Kothos, supreme
sovereign of the airs, brother of Apollo, save me. I’m your highpriest.”

My Father called to him, “I’m going to burn you alive, you and
your god Kothos.”

Then they went on their way, they went into the town and a crowd
of orthodox followed them. He bade them make a fire. They threw
Homeros in and burned him up together with the idols found in his
house. Several surviving pagans accepted baptism and became
Christians. The others refused, took their belongings and threw them
in the river and the lakes, then went off with their idols into the desert.
We counted the idols destroyed on this occasion and found their
number to be 306. In the houses of the fugitives the Christians were
established.

Apart from the miracle of fire, this account may be taken as a
realistic version of what happened again and again. Some
Christians forced their way into a temple, were resisted, called
up the monks, and proceeded to smash the temples and murder
the pagans. A character like Homeros might well have been a
learned man, a philosopher, an alchemist.

Alchemy tended to shift more to the north. We saw in Chapter
III how Aeineias of Gaza in the later 5 th century knew a group of
alchemist artisans. The art developed in Syria, with part of its
writings in Aramaic, and it is significant that Greek Fire was
effectively worked out in this area.

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS

The Greek alchemists who carried on writing dealt now in
compiling extracts from the masters, each a short chapter; the
comprehensive view, which sought to link theory and practice,
was fading out. Soon even the anthologies began to break up,
with loss of the names that guaranteed the worth of a recipe.
The manuscript of St Mark, the oldest we have, is fairly faithful,
but has suffered many mishaps, leaves in the wrong places and
gaps in the texts. The next in age, Paris 2325, is purely practical
and mentions as authors only Demokritos, Synesios, Stephanos—
whereas St Mark still kept a considerable place for theory. In
Paris 2327 the many errors make it seem the work, not so much of
a professional scribe, as of a practising alchemist, who paid atten¬
tion to the recipes but was not much interested in the general state¬
ments. We can perhaps make out three types of manuscript that
have come down: (a) texts like that of St Mark which have already
had a long development behind them, but maintain a strong
theoretical interest and appear as a collection of doctrinal works
with names of authors attached—the items set out in an order
which has its arbitrary aspect but which still does not suffer
unduly from the predilections of the compiler; (b) practical works
mostly of anonymous recipes, with the signed sections kept down
to a minimum; (c) composite collections which include doctrinal
works but without any system and with an aimless irruption of
recipes—the copyist seems to put in anything he thinks relevant
to the alchemic art. 17

In due time alchemy became a pursuit also of Christians. We
have an anonymous writer called The Christian, who seems a
Byzantine monk of the early 6th century, acquainted with
Gnosticism. He speaks of the unquenchable source of Water in
the midst of Paradise. “The divine oracle says: Let us make man
.. . and make male and female.” He has learning and mentions
the shadow of the cone of the earth which reaches to the sphere
of Mercury; cites, in the usual eclectic way, Aratos and Hesiod,
the Bible and Hermes, as well as Agathodaimon, Demokritos,
Petesis, Zosimos; sets out in philosophic language the varieties
of gold-making according to kind and species; reproduces the
geometric concept of the elements from the Pythagoreans and
Platonists; only his first paragraph is original. Near the end of
his treatise he abridges Zosimos’ definition: “Such is the image
of the world, famed in ancient writings, the mystic science of
Egyptian hierograms.” Then he turns to the substantial natures.

373

572 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

showing a gnostic and theological bent of mind. 18 His diction is
like that of Olympiodoros.

He dedicated his work to Sergios, who may be Sergios Resain-
ensis. The latter lived in Alexandreia in the early 6th century and
translated into Syrian the Greek medical and philosophical writers.

With Stephanos we reach the culmination of the rhetorical
tradition, in which both theory and practice are exploited for the
outpouring of flowery and exalted encomia of the sacred art.
He was a philosopher and public professor at Alexandreia under
Heraklios, 610-41. He lectured on Plato and Aristotle, on
geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music—leaving a commentary
on Aristotle and an astronomical work, Apotelesmatike Pragma-
teia, as well as his alchemic treatise, which consists of nine
Praxeis or Lessons, of which the last is dedicated to Heraklios
in extravagantly adulatory terms. Attempts have been made to
argue that the treatise is of the 9th century and not by Stephanos;
that public lectures on alchemy were against the law. But this
latter point falls down. Alchemy had now emerged into the open—
at least as a recognised art, even if the operators still carried on a
secret tradition. True, the style of the treatise is different from that
of Stephanos’ other works, but it is free from the barbarisms that
crop up in the later alchemic texts, and there are many references
to mathematics, astronomy and music—suggesting the wide
interests of the philosopher, who might well feel called on to use
a specific kind of idiom, declamatory and excited, for expounding
the mysterious art. Further, the treatise was known to the
Anonymous Philosopher, who does not seem as late as the 9th
century, and is cited in the Kitab (probably 850). 19

Stephanos has read widely and grasped the main ideas of
alchemy; but he quite lacks the incisive grip of Zosimos. A Chris¬
tian mystic with a confused mixture of idealist ideas drawn from
any school, Pythagorean or Platonist, he wants to feel stirred and
uplifted by suggestive enigmatic images or doctrines. In the last
resort the ideas are playthings, instruments for his edification and
for the display of his rhetorical and rhapsodical powers before
duly dazzled audiences. We may take his first lecture as a sample. 20

Stephanos of Alexandreia the Universal Philosopher and Teacher of the Great
and Sacred Art of Goldmaking. Lecture I with God's Help.

First we praise God the cause of all good things and the king of all,
and his only-begotten Son resplendent before the ages with the Holy

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS

Pneuma, and we earnestly beseech for ourselves the illumination of
the knowledge of him. Next we shall begin by gathering the fairest
fruits of the work undertaken, of this very Treatise, and we trust that
we shall track down the truth. Our problem now must be to proceed
from a true theory of nature.

O nature superior to nature conquering the natures. O nature
become superior to itself, well-regulated, transcending and surpassing
the natures. O nature one and the same yielding and fulfilling the All.
O union completed and separation united O identical and not alien
nature providing the All out of itself O matter immaterial holding
matter fast O nature conquering and rejoicing in nature O heavenly
nature making the pneumatic existence shine forth O bodiless body
making the bodies bodiless O course of the moon illuminating the
whole order of the universe O most generic species and some specific
genus O nature truly superior to nature conquering the natures—tell
what sort of nature you are.

Thus he expands the triadic formula of Ostanes, but in a way
which merely inflates and diffuses it, not a way that applies or
extends its meaning. He now launches into a further ecstatic
series of synonyms for the art of the Stone, the Egg, the Water:

That which in a family sort of way \oikeios\ received itself from
itself again, indeed that which yields sulphur without fire and has the
■ fire-resisting power, the archetype of many names and name of many
forms, the experienced nature and the unfolding, the many-coloured
painted rainbow, that which discloses from itself the All, O nature
itself and displaying its nature from no other nature O like bringing
to light from its like a thing of like nature.

O sea becoming as the ocean drawing up as vapour its many-coloured
pearls. O conjunction of th <stertasomia [four-body system] adorned upon
the surface O inscription of the threefold triad and perfection of the
universal seal, Tody of magnesia by which the whole mystery is brought
about.

O golden-roofed stream of heaven and silver-crested spirit sent
forth from the sea O you that have the silverbreasted robe and provide
the liquid golden curls O fair exercise of the wisest intellects O wise
all-creative power of most holy men O sea inscrutible to uninitiated
men O ignorance seized-on beforehand by vainglorious men O smoky
kindling of disdainful mankind O uncovered light of pious men O
countenance contemplated by virtuous men O sweetly-breathing
flower of practical philosophers. 21

O perfect preparation of a single species O work of wisdom having
a beauty composed of intellect O you flashing such a beam from a
single being upon all O moon drawing a light from the light of the

374 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

sun O single nature itself and no other nature, rejoicing and rejoiced
over, mastering and mastered, saved and saviour, what have you in
common with the host of material things since one thing is natural
and is a single nature conquering the All?

Of what kind are you, tell me of what kind?

Genos, genus and eidos, species, seem to have a specific meaning.
The genera seem to be metals which own a proper phjsis, a term
here referring to an object in which the four elements combine to -
characterise it and give rise to its properties. The species were
such substances as stones, salts, and so on, which were not
counted as bodies with such a phjsis. The system was worked out
by the Anon in the 8 th century, but his explanation of the terms
does not quite accord with earlier usages. Stephanos’ playing on
the concepts of body and spirit, material and immaterial, is based
on the fundamental alchemic use of these terms: the notion that
chemical reagents destroyed the body (metal) and released the
soul, but that the dead metal (some compound in fact) could be
revived—turned again into a metal. 22 But he is as much con¬
cerned with the further series of ideas suggested. Thus, he is
certainly thinking of the endless arguments on phjsis in theolo¬
gical controversies, on the relation of the human and divine
natures of Christ.

I dedicate this great gift to you of good understanding, to you clothed
with virtue, adorned with respect to theoretical practice and settled
in practical theory. Of what kind? Show us, you who have indicated
beforehand that we should have such a gift. I shall declare, and not
hide, of what nature. I confess the grace of the giving of light from
above, which is given to us by the lights of the Father. Hear as intel¬
ligences like angels. Put away the material theory so that you may be
considered worthy to see the hidden mystery with your intellectual
eyes.

For there is need of a single natural [thing] and of one nature
conquering the All. Of such a kind, now clearly to be told you, that
the nature rejoices in the nature and the nature masters the nature and
the natures conquers the nature. For it rejoices on account of the nature
being its own, and it masters it because it has kinship with it, and,
superior to nature, it conquers the nature when the corporeal operation
of the process fulfils the initiation into the mysteries.

For when the incorruptible body is released by death and when it
transforms the fulfilment which has become spiritual, then, superior
to nature, it is like a marvellous spirit. When it masters the body that
it moves, then it rejoices as if over its own habitation, then it conquers

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS 375

that which in disembodied fashion haunts the Whole which is begotten
of the Whole, that is admirable above nature.

What I say to you is the comprehensive magnesia.

After he has worn thin the concrete formula by this tireless and
weakening repetition, his conclusion about magnesia comes as an
anticlimax. Magnesia is often mentioned by alchemists, but none
of the substances they mention is more obscure. Plinius describes
five kinds, which seem to be magnetic oxide of iron. But the
alchemic material, which can be reduced to a metal like moljbdo-
chalkos (lead-bronze), was perhaps a lead or antimony-copper
alloy. It was to some extent volatilised by heat as we hear of
“mercury from magnesia”. The body obtained from its reduction
was thought to be equivalent to the tetrasomia or alloy of the
four base metals. Here Stephanos seems to take it as the basic
underlying substance of the universe. He raises the question
whether the work of transmutation could be done by one eidos
(species) or by several eide. There was disagreement on this point
among alchemists. The fragment On the Assembly of the Philoso¬
phers , attributed to The Philosopher (Demokritos), sets out the
view that a single species was to be used; but the contrary view
is expressed in That the Species is Compound and not Single and What
is its Management, 23

Who will not wonder at the coral-of-gold perfected from you. From
you is the whole mystery brought to perfection, you alone will have
no fear of the knowledge of the same, on you will be spread the radiant
eastern cloud. You will bear in yourself as a guest the multiform images
of Aphrodite, the cupbearer again serving the fire-throwing bearer of
coals—then carrying such a brightness from afar, you veil the same in
bridal fashion, you receive the undefiled mystery of nature.

Whereas Kleopatra spoke openly of the processes of coition,
gestation and birth, Stephanos describes coition in a hidden
allusive way, using the pretext of the bridal veil. The cup¬
bearer could be either Ganymedes or Hebe; the fire-thrower is
Zeus who hurls the lightnings. As sexual intercourse is suggested,
the cup-bearer is probably Ganymedes, who would suit alchemic
imagery as being snatched up from below to the upper regions. 24

I will show you as well the lustre of your nature, I will begin to indi¬
cate your multiform images. For then he who intelligently interweaves
you that have fire without you, rekindles the fiery thing. Looking on

377

37 6 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

your many-coloured visions. I’ll be impotent as I circle round its
beauties. Your radiant pearl blinds the sight of my eye. Your phengites
[moonstone] rekindling astounds all my vision, your shining radiance
gladdens all my heart O nature truly superior to nature, conquering
the natures.

You the whole are the one nature. The same by which the whole
becomes the work. For by an odd number your all-cosmos is systema¬
tised. Then you will understand in what respects you will look ahead,
then you’ll find out in what places will be your ambit, then you’ll stop
the struggles of sedition, then you’ll disclose the kingly purple which
also you’ll bring with your Maiden’s aid. 25

69. The alchemical death of the hermaphrodite (from The Rosary)

The struggles, agones, of sedition, stasis, with the following
advent of the royal purple, seem to refer to the conditions before
Heraklios and to his accession. In the preceding reign of Phokas,
selected by the army, there had been a confused popular triumph;
bloody clashes went on all over the east between the Blues and
the Greens (the circus-factions organised as something like
political parties), between the King’s Men (Melkites in Egypt) and
the masses with their various economic and political grievances.
Heraklios, son of an exarch, was finally sent by the magnates of
Africa to overthrow Phokas and restore what they considered as
order. As he was a strong supporter of Orthodoxy, the Maiden
who helps to bring the purple was perhaps the Virgin Mary. He
indeed had the role of Defender of the Faith forced on him in
wars against the Persians, a crusade to regain a piece of the True
Cross which was said to have been carried off from Jerusalem

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS

The piece was won back; the Persian holy-city, considered the
birthplace of Zoroaster, was burned down; and the statue of the
Persian king Chosroes (round which hovered winged images of
sun, moon and stars) in the temple of the Sun was smashed.

Then there will be, not the recent labour, but a couch canopied with
gold; not a multiform ability, but an allwise sagacity; not a deprivation
of virtuous men, but a fruition of perfect men. For such is the measure of
it to be found in the Odd Number.

The odd number is the natural monad, about which Stephanos
elaborates in the opening of his second lecture. We need not cite
the rest of the first one, since he now divagates into pious remarks
about “all-ruling God” and links the divine water of alchemy
with the grace of Jesus Christ that enables men “to gush forth
rivers of living water”. Fie cries, “Why should we marvel at the
species Chrysokorallos? We should wonder rather at the infinite
Beauty.” It is an example of his distance from Zosimos or Olym-
piodoros that when he goes on to discuss the monad he says
that “it is so called from its remaining immutable and unmoved.
For it displays a circular and spherical contemplation of numbers
like itself.” This Phytagorean mysticism of number is as far as
could be from the alchemic acceptance of the world of movement
and change as the real world. Stephanos shows the decadence of
the tradition in almost every respect.

Indeed a neo-Pythagorean mysticism keeps on blurring out the
alchemic insights which Stephanos glibly repeats and elaborates.
His second lecture has many Pythagorean comments on numbers,
and he declares:

For they who pluck the strings say that Orpheus made melody with
rhythmical sounds so that the symphony should re-echo the co¬
ordinated movement of the elements and the sounding melody should
be harmoniously perfected. For from the one instrument the whole
composition takes its origin, hence also the organisation of the articu¬
late body is ordered in the bones and joints and parts and nerves, and,
by the plectrum of the air, given forth in the fashion of a moving
instrument, a voice is sent forth to the One which is joined to its essence
and which conquers and organises it by its own life: the very mode and
blending of the air.

For of two extreme qualities there is found one mediator and concilia¬
tor which preserves the qualities of both on account of its resemblance
and close kinship to them.

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS

379

378 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

There we see a deep sense of inner organic relations, such as we
find in Galen, but also a collapse of the true alchemic doctrine
of the fusion of opposites. Stephanos returns to the Pythagorean
doctrine of a reconciliation of opposites, which Aristotle also
developed in his own way: the middle-class idealisation of a way
of life that kept down and controlled the unruly opposites of the
aristocracy and the plebeians. Stephanos uses this concept, which
ultimately implies the arrest of development, not its driving-on
to the crucial points of change, in the key of his exposition of the
emperor Heraklios as ending the “struggles of sedition”. Alchemy
has become respectable and accommodated itself to the world of
power.

The same doctrine of arrest, which abandons the view of the
world as ceaseless movement and change, appears in Stephanos’
formulation at the outset of the third lecture:

How the [world] is fashioned and how the divine parts of it, being well
purified, fly upwards, which, being level, draw up after them the more
level parts. For the method mystical chemistry consists of symbols
[here appears the sign for ouranos, heaven, and the zodiacal Scales], and
what is required is operated by method. So also the bodies, made
metallic, and being changed from the contrary nature, become by
certain method level and aitherial.

The term epipedos, level or flat, suggests the arrival at a space where
the process ceases to operate, an etherial level outside the universe
of change. The pantheist concept of Zosimos excludes th6 pos¬
sibility of such a conclusion. The “change from the contrary”
has become here in Stephanos a change to a state where contraries
do not function.

Treatises were attributed to the emperors Heraklios and Justinian.
A part of the work under the latter’s name survives; Heraklios
was brought in because of his patronage of alchemy. The Anony¬
mous is a sciolast, later than Stephanos, whom he cites. He writes
on gold-making on the divine water, gives the first list of oecume¬
nical philosophers; and feels nothing odd in mixing their names
with the Christian Trinity and Biblical references. 26 Then come
some late unimportant compilers, Pappos (probably of the 7th-
8th centuries; Salmanas, who seems a century or two later by his
style; Kosmas, round about 1000, who uses barbarous terms like
salonitron , t^aparikon; Michael Psellos (1018-78), the famous
literary man, who composed two minor and unoriginal works.

which however helped to spread alchemic ideas in the West;
Nikephoros Blemmydes of the 13 th century, an inhabitant of
Byzantion, who still looked to Demokritos and his school; and
nameless writers like the man who compiled a Lexikon of Gold-
making, in which magnesia is explained in three quite different
ways. 27

We spoke above of the movement of serious alchemic work to
the Syrian area. From the mid-5 th century Nestorian and Mono-
physite heretics in exile had been carrying Greek ideas of medicine,
astronomy, alchemy, throughout Syria and Persia. The reign of
Heraklios saw the first expansion of the Arabs, who were soon
to take over alchemic experimental work.

There are also four poems on alchemic themes, all written in
iambic lines of twelve syllables, with caesura usually falling after the
seventh syllable. Each poem has the name of a different author
attached to it—Heliodoros, Theophrastos, Hierotheos, Archelaos
—but the style and treatment are so similar throughout that there
seems no doubt they are all the work of a single poet, who had
soaked himself in the writings of Stephanos. There is nothing new
in the poems, but in many passages the ideas and images of
Stephanos are ingeniously expanded. The Christian idiom grows

70. The winged hermaphrodite symbolising the red stone (from The

Rosary )

380 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

stronger as the basis in laboratory-work grows weaker and the
whole thing is conceived almost entirely as satisfying material
for an allegory. The similarity of sound in baptein, to dip or
tinge, and bapti^ein, to baptise, is felt to be significant; allusions
to the New Testament grow more frequent; and mystical extra¬
vagances take over the place held by symbolic correspondences.
Imagery of death and resurrection are dwelt on for their own sake.
We saw above Theophrastos on the Ouroboros; as a further example
of the style we may take a passage from the poem of Archelaos:

Then longingly she cries at what she sees.

Freed from her body, how may she again,
she wonders, there remain, now spirit-like.

So modified in shape and form is she
no trace is left in her of darkening mist,
no trace. Instead, she wears a splendour now,
changing her murk for white and glistening light,
tier former instrument she views out-stretched,
struck motionless, with loss of speech and life,
awaiting resurrection from the tomb.

The prey of many torments and assaults,
she comes nearby with bright and joyous looks,
and thus her body’s prostrate form addresses
with tranquil voice—with signs and not with words.

“Come but! Rise up from Hades’ deadly pit!

Cast from yourself the darkness and the gloom!

Wrench off the shroud of death again, the clothes
that marked you, up till now, as one condemned,
in which so many burnings were endured
that you might show yourself in all refined,
transformed like spirit and revivified
by her the Soul who lately uprose from you
and who will quickly five in you again
when Spirit comes, a third, to crown the whole.

You were a corpse before, a thing corrupted,
and empty of life you dwelt inside the tomb,
empty of form, of breath, quite lacking grace.

Defeated in battle now you avoid the strife,
in closely contested conflict you’ve been beaten
and seem a fugitive to one and all.

Conquered within, you may no longer stay
to ward off darts that assail you from outside.

By swimming away on the element of water
you do not wait till the woman’s joined with you

THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS

381

in marriage as you desired. You do not check
the clash of female conflict, but your bloom
is ravaged by her power. Thick darkness then
hides all your shining beauty in a tomb:
breathless and lifeless, a corpse wrapt in a shroud,
you expose the face alone of all your frame.

Cast out and naked you seem to all beholders,
waiting without a voice for life to come,
saying by signs: Where is that living soul
which left me once and took its life away?

Unite us, make me brighten with her again,
my likeness now is all defiled with murk,
immerse my form and wipe it off in cleanness
that I may be a shining habitation
made fair and glorious, O Soul, for you.

Bearing no blackness and no stain of filth
but rather like a strong and powerful light
pouring its rays out, in a flawless splendour,
so that a victor’s crown may be deserved:
reconquering the one who struggled with me
in close combat. I’ll show a handsome home,
a worthy dwelling-place for both my guests,
the Spirit and the purifying Soul.”

These Three united in a steady bond
of firm affection and of constant love
shall dwell together, truly unified,
the Body, Soul and Spirit: not subdued
by fellowship but rather beautified.

They fight the fire with light and cripple fire
by tingeing at their will. They feel no fear,
a stronghold triply fortified and stable,
to one another intimately mated
in fourfold manner by the elements.

With penetration they abide. They tinge
arid give to bodies every kind of colour. 28

There we must leave Graeco-Roman alchemy. The foundations
in method and theory had been laid. The Arabs were to pick the
art up and hand it on to the West. No new ideas emerged; but in
the application many new incidental discoveries were made, and
the tensions between the practical side and the insufficient theory
were to build up till modern chemistry began to develop with
Boyle and others in the 17th century. All that, however, is not
part of our story.

CONCLUSIONS

Conclusions

We have now viewed the birth of this strange science—strange
in itself and strange in its whole way of development. It emerges
and grows during its vital formative period in secrecy and does
its utmost to remain secret and to avoid connections with any
social or economic forces in its world, despite its strong links
with many technological processes. The secrecy, we may say,
was not altogether its own choosing. Through its connection
with “gold-making” it was liable to bring the whole weight of the
authorities down upon it—though its true exponents were not at
all concerned with making gold for their own enrichment. They
sought the clue to the nature of process, the nature of life itself,
and nothing less. But, reinforced by the various cautions, there
was the deep bias towards secrecy brought about by the two main
bodies from whom the whole impetus towards the new science
came: craft-fraternities and mystery-groups. Each of these in its
own way had a strong tradition of keeping secret its essential
lores or discoveries. The alchemist thus from £he outset felt bound
by a passionate devotion to his art, which he opposed to the
world of power, money, accepted usages. He had staked everything
on his personal quest into the unknown, and the demands of the
world were felt only as shackles, corruptions, diversions, distor¬
tions. His lonely dedication became the pledge of his worth, of
his right to the quest and its revelations. In all this he had affinities
with the devotees of the various dissident religious groups,
including early Christianity, but he also has his profound difference
from those groups. In his pantheist-materialist way he was con¬
cerned with actual process, with the structure and laws of the
nodal points in material change.

In a general way the notion of scientific research as somehow
identical with mystery-initiation was widespread. Dion Chysos-
tom remarked:

383

Here is a correct enough comparison. Suppose you invited a Greek or a
Barbarian and took him into a mystery-temple of a prodigious beauty
and grandeur. He would see there all sorts of secret visions, he would
hear all sorts of mysterious voices. Darkness and light would alternate
in his eyes, not to mention an infinity of other spectacles. Besides, as is
usually done in the ceremony of Enthronement, after installing the
initiate on a throne, the initiators would dance in a choir around him.
Is it credible that such a man would feel no emotion in his soul and that
he would not grasp the idea that all that was accomplished in virtue of
a design and of preparation full of wisdom? . . .

How is it different, he asks, in the Cosmos which is also a beauti¬
ful Temple? Seneca even more directly links the mysteries of
Nature with those of Eleusis :

There are mysteries where the initiation is not completed in one day.
Eleusis reserves secrets that it reveals only to those who return to see
her. Nature too does not reveal all her mysteries at once. We think we
are initiates when we are still only in the vestibule. These arcana do not
unveil themselves in a hurry, nor to all men. They have been withdrawn
to the depths of the sanctuary, well apart in an inner chapel. Our
century has seen a part of them; the age to follow us will make out
others. When will they come in their entirety to our knowledge? Great
discoveries are slow, especially when effort languishes. 1

The alchemist, for the various reasons we have noted, drew the
logical conclusions: that the scientific mysteries should be revealed
only to the initiates. In so doing he was making the best of a bad
job: for certainly in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods any attempt
to practise and to teach in public would have meant prosecution
for counterfeiting and for meddling in matters strictly reserved
for the State. For quite different reasons the State and the alche¬
mist were concerned with gold, considered the purest of metals.
The State .because of its worldly economic value; the alchemist
because of its unworldly spiritual-and-scientific value as the
supposed highest level of matter.

In our first chapter we sketched out the main attitudes, the
underlying and unquestioned preconceptions, of the world from
which the alchemist arose. Let us glance afresh at the limitations
of the classical outlook. Aristotle’s synthesis had been specially
weak, almost blank, on mechanics, as men like Archimedes and
Hipparchos could not but grow aware. The Greeks were able to
deal only with combinations of forces or motions that were in

CONCLUSIONS

384 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

the same straight line or were parallel, as with levers. Without
something like the calculus no notion of instantaneous velocity
could be worked out; hence Aristotle’s inability to deal effectively
with planetary motion or free fall. In the Hellenistic age, Archi¬
medes made the first step towards the infinitesimal calculus and
Hipparchos was feeling his way towards the modern concept of
momentum; but these explorations could not be carried further
in their society. The Aristotelean categories of motion held the
dominant position, and were inherited by the medieval world.
In the sublunar sphere all natural motion was rectangular, light
things rising from the earth’s centre, heavy things falling down to
it. As that centre was a fixed point, there was no problem about
defining up and down, lightness or heaviness. 2 All deviations
from the rectilinear were thus seen as the result of violent motion,
with some force deflecting the light or heavy body from its natural
straight line. In the celestial spheres above the moon, however,
motion was natural, in a circle, as on earth rest was natural,
violated only by the application of force. Aristotle did not state
the proposition that the application of a constant force imparts a
constant velocity to a body, but it was implied in all pre-Galilean
mechanics.

Special cases where the Aristotelean system did not apply kept
coming up, but it was not till the advent of projectiles [i.e. gun¬
powder and its blast-power) that such a case proved so difficult as
to break the whole system down. Already, however, among the
Greeks there had been much strain on Aristotle’s two main
dynamical principles: that movement required a continuous
efficient cause to keep it going, and that space had an organised
qualitative structure with different natural directions for different
substances. 3 As a result, the geometrical space-systems ended by
having so little relation to the accepted system of dynamics that a
distinction came to be drawn between mathematical and physical
theories, with two criteria (stated by Ptolemaios) for choosing
which was to be used: the one that saved the phenomena most
accurately and with the smallest number of necessary assump¬
tions. This distinction was taken up afresh in the West in the
I2th-i3th centuries.

Gunpowder, ballistics and projectiles were the force that blew
up the ancient systems inherited by the medieval world; but the
discovery and use of gunpowder did not arise technologically in
a social vacuum. That discovery and its concomitant problems

385

were the expression of the new bourgeois forces slowly breaking
through the old balances: the interlocked feudal system of hier¬
archies which had replaced the ancient system of freeman and
slave interlocked in what was more or less a technological im¬
passe. For the systems which fundamentally resisted any deep¬
going change, the world existed in a condition of “natural rest”,
which was only disturbed by directly interfering (and in their
sense, unnatural) forces. The Aristotelean tradition held that the
interfering forces resided in the medium (air, water, etc.) where
the motion took place. The medium did not move but was charged
with the capability of moving; it resisted movement but was
locally and temporarily defeated by the application of a constant
force, though it still expressed its nature by limiting the attainable
velocity; it thus had a contradictory effect, reducing a body to
rest, yet protracting movement after the force’s effects had ended.

A little thought will bring out the way in which the Aristote¬
lean scheme of things ideally represented the problems of move¬
ment and change in a slave-society. And it could in turn become
the expression of a feudal society, which, though discarding
slavery, reposed on an equally stubborn and inert basis, serfdom.

Flowever, in late antiquity the glimmerings of a different system
appeared in a thinker like John Philoponos of Byzantion (6th
century). Men began to argue that when a stone was thrown or
slung, the efficient cause maintaining the velocity was an inner
tendency imparted by the thrower to the stone. Behind the new
conception there lay the considerable social changes which had
gone on in the Byzantine world, the shaking of the ancient bases
without the ability to break through into new forms, and so on—
historical changes we cannot probe here, though we may note
the accompanying growth of new projectile mechanisms cul¬
minating in Greek-Fire, the precursor of gunpowder and cannon.
Philoponos’ notion of the Impetus reached the West in the 14th
century through men like Jean Buridan, and eventually, linked
with the technological advances of the I5th-i6th centuries (espe¬
cially the complex of physical, mechanical, chemical developments
centred on gunpowder), issued in Galilean mechanics and New¬
tonian physics. “The classical scientists had studied bodies at
rest, or bodies acting in each other with relatively steady forces.
The new world was to consider the problem of bodies in violent
motion, and on this basis was to found a new and much more
comprehensive mechanics.” 4

CONCLUSIONS

386 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

There then is the dilemma of ancient science considered from a
new angle. We have seen that the Aristotelean systems did not
carry on without various challenges, of which the main one was
the Stoic concept of pneuma as a tensional force pervading the
whole universe. But this concept, however fruitful in a general
way, could not develop effectively a system of physics to supplant
the Aristotelean. Similarly Plato’s ideas of symmetry-asymmetry
as the source of movement or development, and his triadic
schemes of vital structure, could not do other than impact as
general ideas on a stubborn world of “natural rest”. Galen had a
remarkable sense of growth as a continual reassertion of structure
in new conditions of tension. “This nature which shapes and
gradually adds to the parts is most certainly extended throughout
their whole substance. Yes, indeed, she shapes and nourishes and
increases them through and through, not on the outside only .” 5
But he saw this process only in terms of the individual (isolated)
organism and thus could not apply the symmetry-asymmetry
principle in terms of fused inner-and-outer tensions at work.

Where, then, do our alchemists come in? They took over many
ideas from Aristotle about the elements, metals and the like, but in
effect they brushed his physics aside. They accepted the Stoic idea
of a unitary process and proceeded to see where it led them, not
merely as a general or a moral idea, but as a guide to scientific
action. Thus they were able to apply the Platonic triads in a con¬
crete way and to discard the whole notion of natural rest. They
attained at least a partial consciousness of the revolutionary step
they had made, as we see from Zosimos’ account of the unity of
all processes, his insistence on the use of the triadic formula in a
way that embraced theory and practice in a dynamic unity, and
his rejection of both the empirical and the magical-mystical way.
We see it again in Olympiodoros’ rejection of the notion of the
absolute, of a changeless reality. But these men could not possibly
have comprehended anything like all the implications. For one
thing they were not interested in the speculations that finally led to
the impetus theory. They were not interested in the mechanical
aspects of the world at all . 6

In this fact lay both their weakness and their strength. They
contributed nothing to the line of ideas which led through Philo-
ponos into Buridan and Galileo; and on the whole they would
have considered that this was an incorrect line for science to take.
Clearly they could not have denied the new grasp of phenomena

387

that was thereby made possible, but they would have argued that
the grasp had been obtained at too great a cost, or that the results
it brought had been misapplied. The consequences, in the alche¬
mic view, were to divorce man from nature, to give mechanistic
aspects a vastly undue importance in the scheme of things, and to
lose sight of the flashpoints of change or development.

What the alchemists took over from classical Greek thought
was the concrete sense of the object, the concentration on its
qualities; but they attempted at the same time to break through the
limitations of this attitude, not by ignoring qualities and concern¬
ing themselves solely with the quantitative mechanics and dyna¬
mics of objects in interrelation, but by putting the objects into
interaction with one another as units composed of qualities.
Their problem was that they could not effectively explore and
extend this method without quantitative systems to provide a
secure basis for their experimentations; the only way historically
open for the creation of those systems lay through Philoponos
and Galileo. Men were not able, as they still are not able, to deal
simultaneously with the abstract world of quantities and the con¬
crete world of qualities.

History shows that the feasible way forward was through
Philoponos; but that does not simply wipe out the alchemists as
misguided enthusiasts. On the one hand there is the mere prag¬
matic defence of their work. However fantastic the theory, the
work itself did draw attention to problems of chemistry. In its
development or expansion over the centuries, especially through
the Arabs and various western alchemists like Paracelsus, it made
many incidental discoveries of great importance. And finally in
the issues it raised in its declining years, in the transitional schools
(such as that of the Phlogiston Theory) which it evoked, it led
the way to chemistry on a quantitative basis—chemistry without
the vision of unitary process and of nodal points of qualitative
change. (Modern chemistry was not just alchemy without the
nonsense; it was alchemy tamed, reduced wholly to a quanti¬
tative level, and thus giving up its ghost.)

On the other hand we can put up a defence that would have
been more to the taste of the alchemists themselves. We can admit
the weaknesses, the enormous scope of the aims and hopes in
comparison with the technical resources on which they were to be
realised. We can admit that without precise forms of control—
those afforded by quantitative methods or checks, and by much

388 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

more effective apparatus—the art was doomed to go round for
the most part in wasteful circles, unable to find firm ground on
which to advance step by step. We can admit that fantasy and
intuitive guesswork played an inordinate part in the art. And yet
we can still hold that the alchemists were on the track of something
that still eludes scientific method and inquiry. Something that is
nowadays becoming more and more relevant to the scientific
comprehension of reality. Just as thermodynamics in the 19th
century brought physics back in some respect to underlying ideas
that owned certain affinities with classical Greek ideas, so the
advent of atomic physics and quantum mechanics brings science
up against problems that remind us of both stoic field-theory and
alchemy. It might be argued that the unifying theses which are
so badly needed by the physics of our day will turn out, when and
if they are found, to be closer to Zosimos than to Galileo in some
fundamental aspects.

The unity of human and natural process, as set out by the
alchemists, may have many fantastic elements; yet it may very
well hold an essential truth which was lost with the appearance
of Galilean mechanics and its method of excessive abstraction.
The reduction of the world to quantitative elements banishes man
from the scene, for it banishes all concrete objects with their

71. Alchemical resurrection (from The Rosary)

CONCLUSIONS 389

essentially qualitative existence. Life becomes the ghost in the
machine. True, the gap is partly bridged by biology and its con¬
nected disciplines; but in a world of thought dominated by
quantitative mechanisms, biological issues can only be realised
in limited aspects or through a distorting mirror. The problem
posed by the alchemists, that of founding a truly human science,
without the abstraction thrusting between man’s senses and the
external world, is still to be solved. In this sense the alchemists
were not day dreamers of a confused moment of the past; they
were the prophets of a future yet to be realised.

I have spoken of the final role played by alchemy in the transitional
schools that lead up to the chemistry of Priestley, Lavoisier,
Dalton. The role of alchemy in the 17th century still needs to be
fully assessed. It is a noteworthy point that more alchemic books
appeared in English between the years 1650-80 than in all the
time before and after that period. 7 The effect on culture appears
strongly in the poetry of the 17th century, in our so-called
Metaphysical Poets. But the point I should like to make here is
the way in which a new sort of attention was paid to Colour after
the triumph of the new mechanics in Newton. The Romantic
Movement was founded by the poetry of Thomson and Savage,
in which appears a neiv dynamic sense of colour , op light as a sort of
formative principle. These ideas were developed by the romantic
poets, with special attention to the changes of light, colour and
tone at morning and evening. Ann Radcliff called the dusk “the
transforming hour”; and the way in which the poets used dusk-
imagery to express the merging of vast elemental and human
changes was in a pure alchemic idiom. In Smart’s Jubilate the
conscious defiance of Newton breaks out in a paean to colour as
the creative force, a denial of the Lockean position that the qualities
derived from sense-experience were subjective and unreal when
set next tg the laws of mechanics and the quantitative analysis;
in Blake this anti-Newtonism reaches a matured philosophic
position. In turn these romantic positions beget the great colour-
art of Turner and Delacroix, the increasing concentration on
light which culminates in the Impressionists. There is no space
here to elaborate these points; but it is highly significant that
just as the alchemists developed their belief in the primary impor¬
tance of colour in their reaction against purely geometrical and
arithmetical notions of matter, so the romantics developed their

39 ° ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

retort of colour-arts to the Newtonian mechanism. We may add
that the last word has by no means been scientifically spoken on
the nature of colour and its function in the universe.

Now to return to the more direct problems raised by alchemy, we
might say that what happened with Galileo was not the over¬
coming of the problems raised by the Aristotelean schema; it was
rather simply the reversal of the situation. In the classical Greek
view, man was cut off inside his own qualities; in the post-Galilean
view, he is cut off outside the world of quantities. The alchemist
sought to work outwards from the isolated bundle of qualities
into the grasp of processes where objects remained whole and
yet fused with one another into new unities. He failed in his
objectives, because he tried to do too much with too little in
hand; and with all his vast hopes he had far too limited a view of
what the problems of material transformation involved. With his
newly-found faith in the possibilities of transformation he had no
sense at all of the stabilities or symmetries of organised matter,
of the depths to which he must penetrate before he could touch
the levels and the systems of transformation, of the minute and
fugitive complexity of those systems. Despite the many tributes
paid to Demokritos, no attempt was made to consider transforma¬
tion at the atomic level. With the poor means of measurement at
the disposal of scientists in ancient days we could not indeed
expect any attempts to define elements at that level; but we may
still wonder at the lack of any general theorising on this point,
especially as Plato had given a basis for the discussion of differing
geometrical structures among the atoms. 8

However, when the worst is said, the remarkable nature of the
alchemic aim remains. We may definitely claim that the alchemists
were the first scientists in the full sense of the word. That is, they
did not merely contemplate phenomena and seek to deduce regu¬
larities from them; they did not merely make models on mathe¬
matical principles to reflect the operation of phenomena. They
took a fully active attitude. They sought to grasp the nature of
process itself and to test out their ideas in the laboratory, to re¬
create and repeat phenomena under controlled conditions. That
their controls were too often inadequate and crude is beside the
point. They did make the attempt to grasp and recreate processes,
and that is the crucial thing.

In this they show their link with the craft-world; for there the

conclusions 39 1

question of understanding processes so as to be able to repeat
them is the essence of the whole business. The alchemists thus
reveal the breakthrough of the craftsman into the world of
scientific contemplation and model-making. Contemplation
becomes the theoretical side of the active effort to control and
change matter; model-making becomes the practical work of
grasping, modifying and changing reality. The alchemist accepts
nature for what it is, in order to change it into what it might be;
accepts himself for what he is, in order to change himself into
what he might be. The lonely struggle with substances in still or
alembic becomes the struggle of all men to free themselves from
existing fetters and to advance into a qualitatively new sphere of
experience, a new social union. Zosimos in announcing the in¬
dissoluble link of theory and practice has brought something
quite new into culture; and it is this more than anything else
that sounds the doom of the ancient world with its bias towards
contemplation and its sense of the active sphere (apart from war
and government) as servile.

In the last resort it is this unity of craft-process with theoretical
thought which is the great revolutionary mark of alchemy and
which explains why it could find no accepted place in the systems
of the ancient world. When in the 17th century an assured scienti¬
fic method was at last established with a mixture of the particular
and the general, with an appeal to experimental method, this was
not the same as the alchemic unity; for the concept of nature in
perpetual qualitative change was omitted and in its place was
put the concept of perpetual quantitative movement. Therefore
the question of directions and of values was not present. For the
exponents of post-Galilean science this lack has seemed a proof
of virtue and of objectivity. The alchemist would reply that if you
exclude humanity (the concrete object of qualities), you exclude
reality in any essential sense and your results have a limited and
ultimately anti-human aspect. This book is not the place to argue
such problems out; but I should be failing in my love and respect
for the alchemists if I did not add that in this matter I am on their
side. That is, I consider a true and complete science to be one
which includes the alchemic viewpoints, but with the addition
of the various methodological precisions which are the great
achievement of post-Galilean developments. The complete
science I visualise would then be one capable of dealing with more
than symmetries in nature, the stable states which quantitative

392 ORIGINS OF ALCHEMY IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGPYT

analysis can compass; it would know how to grasp and define
at the same time all crucial points of change, in which new qualities
emerge; and it would vitally link its inquiries into natural process
with the needs of a humanity that knew where it was going.

What is implied by these comments may perhaps be made
clearer by a passage from the writings of a great critic of the
unconscious assumptions and preconceptions of modern science:

The assumption, that cause equals effect, dominated the later phases of
Greek philosophic thought, and determined the entire development of
exact science. Plato asked “how can that be real which is never in the
same state? Aristotle held that “in pursuing the truth one must start
from things that are always in the same state and never change”. Greek
atomism and, until recently, modern atomic theory found the real
basis of nature in permanent and unchanging constituent units.
Quantitative physics abstracted ideal reversible processes from observed
phenomena and constructed quantitative energy-functions which were
conserved in the processes which it treated as isolable. J. R. Mayer
based his formulation of the principle of the conservation of energy on
a general law of the quantitative indestructibility of cause.

So remarkable has been the success of this assumption that few have
noticed that it is an assumption, and fewer still have seen grounds to
quesdon its adequacy . . . [But] the invariant factor in process need
not itself be timeless, but may consist in a universal tendency towards a
defined end-condition. The clue to the order of nature may not be a
principle of permanence, but a universal pattern of process displaying
an invariant one-way tendency. For it is not change, but only arbitrary
change, which eludes the rational intellect. ( L. L. Whyte.) 9

This, in my opinion, is the sort of science that the alchemists
glimpsed; and it is perhaps a heartening thought that the men who
founded the unity of scientific theory and practice in consistent
laboratory-work had such a system in their minds, however
inadequate were their methods for realising it—that their essen¬
tial positions were opposed to mechanist assumptions which, in
place of the real universe of irreversible process, put an abstract
symmetrical construction where action and reaction are equal and
opposite. With all their limited applications they yet saw reality as
unitary, concrete, involving critical or nodal points of change, and
consisting of interrelated hierarchical levels of organisation; and
they wanted a method above all which brought all these aspects to¬
gether. They saw human values as implicated in every phase of the
work and as determining the direction of research from within the
processes, not merely as a system of ends imposed from without. 10

Notes

i. GREEK SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT BEFORE ALCHEMY

1. Tannery (3)510 thinks it the organising period; Burnet, the opposite. “Hesiod’s
conviction that he lives in the decadent Iron Age now becomes in E. the belief that
his own human existence is wedged in between a Golden Age of the past, when Love
prevailed, and a brighter future when that Age shall come again, only to be van¬
quished by the.reign of Hate,” Jaeger, Theology of Early Gr. Philosophers, 1967, 143.
For rel. of E. and Anaxagoras, and notion of the Elements, O’Brien.

2. Santillana, 115 f.

5. Chemiss (2) argues that A. overstates the role of opposites in earlier stages;
but he does not grasp the deep primitive roots.

4. See for example JL (2) and (3). In a more abstract way, Levi-Strauss in his
Totemism, etc.

5. Cornford 25 f.

6. Demok. fr. 164; Cornford 35

7. Peri phys. paid. xvii (Litree vii 496); Cornford 36 f.

8. CH iii 91, no. xxii; cf. Aetios v 11 (Diels 422a 13); Ps.-Galen, hist phil. 115
(612d), cf. Aet. v 3-19, Stob. 1 42 (i, 294-6 W.); Gal. iv 603, 607, 609, 613, 626
(Kiihn), Wellmann, Pneum. Sch. 100 ff; Tert. de an. v 4, xxv 9 (Wasz. comment. 128 f,
333 f); Scott iii 405-70, Ferguson iv 447 f; J. Kroll (2) 249-51.

9. Tim. 63c; Cornford 38 f. See also Bochner (1) 155 on Arist. phys. iv and topos
of a body as the inner boundary of what it contains; 152-60 for concepts of space
in Plato and Aristotle, and A.’s concepts as viewed from thermodynamic angle,
159; further Bochner (2).

10. Tim. 81a.

11. Degen. et corr. 323 bio; Joachim adloc.; Theophr., de sens.

12. Sext., adv. math, vii 116; Arist. de anima 409 b 24. Diog. of Apol. had soul =
air, primary element, so the soul could know all things on the like-to-like principle;
Tim. 27; Theophr. de sens. i. For general principle, Plato, Lysis 215c; Arist. E.N.
viii 1, met. 984b 23.

13. Emt. iv 4, 40, cf. ii 4, 5, “The eye, which is luciform, extending itself to the
light, and to colours which are illuminations, says that what is under colours is
dark and material and concealed by the colours.”

14. Bochner (1) 167 f. Galileo of course had his predecessors (M. Clagett, The
Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages, 1959) but was nonetheless decisive in his
advance.

15. Arist.///)'!'. vii and de caelo iii; (1) 65 f; Themist.,//)'J'. 208, 13.

16. Gamsey, 3 & 24; Plout. mor. 719 be; Farringdon (1) 29 f.

17. De re rep. i 43.

18. Sambursky (2) 92-5; breakdown of Aristot. concept of topos, 95. Greek
maths, failed to get beyond idealisation, a process of abstraction from “direct
actuality,” Bochner 18.

394 NOTES

19. Mechanike: post, amlyt. 78b 37; Heath (1) 11 f. Aristotle, (193b 22, 194a
I 5 ). wonders if astronomy, optike, and harmonike can be distinguished from maths.;
but here, as in Metaph., is sure that physike is distinct: Bochner 144 f.

20. A. N. Whitehead, Concept of Nature, 1930, 24; Bochner 180 f: see 145 fif for
Aristotle; also Solmsen and W. D. Ross.

21. Phys. 225b 16 to 226a 23 : “nor becoming of becoming, nor in general change
of change.”

22. Bochner 168. Eudoxos established the volumes of cone and pyramid: the first
form of integral calculus. “Lacking a kinematics, the Greeks had little inducement
to develop a coresponding different calculus,” Santillana 236. But both lack and
no-inducement came from the same socio-intellectual basis.

23. Sambursky (1) 48 f; Iambi, de comm. math. sc. xxxii (93, 11).

24. Tim. 87 cd. For Philolaos: Plato, Phaid. 6id; Apollod. (Diog. L. ix 38);
Diog. L. iii 6; Cicero mentions him as Pythag. teacher of Plato, cf. Interpr., DL iii
6 ; Iambi. V. Pytb. 23 and 31; Porph. V.P. 40. Said be first Pythag. to publish
doctrines; his works were said to be called Bacchai (prob. name given by an admirer).
For demiurge: Dield, Vors. i 301, it seems possible then that Demiurge was a general
Pythag. idea. Demokritos had also the concept of symmetry and a-symmetry: “Some
(atoms) rebound in random directions, while others interlock because of the sym¬
metry of their shapes, positions, and arrangements, and remain together. This is how
compound bodies were begun,” Santillana 146.

25. Tim. 58de. Aristotle wanted to explain perceptible things by perceptible
principles; saw maths, as merely such things abstracted from their qualities; never
asked if math, elements (e.g. geom. shapes) could be used as symbols to describe
physical realities; never grasped that Plato did not attribute weight etc. to his
triangles. Thus both Plato and Demokritos came under his censure. S (1) 29-31.

26. Tim. 59 be. Various kinds of fire, j8ce. Fifth element: Lloyd (2) 103 f, 134-9.
160 f; F (1) ii 231 f; Epinomis has the five elements.

Stephanos speaks of the 5 th element, which in medieval days became the
Quintessence.

27. Tim. 5oab.

28. Tim. 59ab.

29. Tim. 37c. Paradeigma-. Rep. vi joode; Theait. jj 6 e, 3. Note play on words,
egasthe', rejoiced, and agalma (thing-of-joy).

30. Tim. joe.

31. Tim. 52e. Note passage of Demok. cited above. Cf. example of blowing
through pipe into bladder of sand and lead filings, Cornford 37.

32. Tim. 53d, cf. Phileb. i-je.. There is metaphor of joiner and wood, Tim. 69a ( hyle
— both wood and matter); also in same sentence a metaphor from weaving.

33. Tim. 31b; 35b, cf. Soph. 244 f, greatest kinds or main categories: Storey.

I have no room here to discuss the many dialectical ideas in Plato. Note that to pan,
the whole, appears often in Tim., a term much loved by alchemists.

34. De caelo iii-iv; de gen. et corr.\ met. etc.

35. Holmyard (4) 17 f.

36. Met. iii 6, 378c; 378a 26 If; 388a 13 (included silver, tin, and prob. lead);
389a. Realgar, ochre, ruddle all used as red pigments.

37. Joachim (1); S (2) 12.

38. Olymp., comm, in Met. (Stiine 270, 24 f); Eicholz, 28 ff. Alchemists identified
dry vapour with sulphur, moist with mercury; developed theory all metals made
up of mercury and sulphur.

39. Eicholz 15 ff; 20 f on filtering in Tim. 6obc. Fire, de lap. 54; Eicholz 38; Tim.
67c on. I would like to discuss here and elsewhere in the book Greek views on
light, colour, vision, but can only refer to the account in Theophr. de sensu.

40. Arist. met. 341,16 and 340b 29. De sensu 443a 21 f, 27 f. Hard to envisage: Met.
34qb 15. Gradings of colour: Plin. xxxiii 59; Lippmann (1) i 7; Eicholz 118-120.

notes 395

41. De lap. 58-60. Kermes: from which red dye, really an insect though the
ancients did not know it. Distempering: Hdt. iii 8; Thouk. iii 20. Silvermines:
Laurion. Date of invention, c. 405. No doubt K. had rented a holding at mines,
but after Spartan occupation of Dekeleia, 412, he migrated to Asia Minor, hoping
for gold in river-valleys. Eicholz, 8-12,127; Thorndyke (2) errs to date, 7 f. Theophr.
says whitelead, verdigris, cinnabar, all produced by imitation of nat. process of
separation, ekkrisis (Arist. meteor. 381 b8).

42. S (2) ch.i, 1, and his discussion of the idea of the elements. For early use of
“breath”, Anaximenes, see Croissant on ultimate mechanistic basis. Heidel notes
how even in Hippok. treatises physiological processes are conceived in terms of
inanimate nature. Cannot go further into the pneuma of the Stoics and allied Iranian
concepts; sperm and pneuma, CH iii p. lxxxiv on; dynamic pneumatike or sperm,
Galen, ib xcv. Asthma-. Edsman (1) 221; Bidez (1) ii 155; Cumont (6) 407 n 2 etc.

43. DL vii 156; Galen, nat.fac. i 11, 25; ii 4, 89; S (2) 3 f; Cic. nat. deor. ii 23-8.

44. Galen, de loc. aff.v 1; Plout. stoic, repug. io34d. Sleep as relaxation of sensory
tension, DL vii 158. For pneuma-. add H. Thesleff, Intro, to Pythag. Writers of the
Hellenistic Period 1961 68 f; G. Verbeke, E’Evolution de la Doctrine du Pneuma 1945
(esp. ii9f; 156O; F. Brehier (1) 152 and 211 {pneuma characteristic of Middle Stoa).

45. S (2) 7 f with refs.

46. S (2) 9; Galen, nat.fac. ii 3, 82.

47. S (2) 22 and 18-20. Dynamic of pneuma-. Stob. i 371, 22; Simplik. categ. 165,
52-166, 29, and Gal. metb. med. i 6 (Arnim ii 494). Plot, enn, ii 7, 1. 52-2, 2.
Chrysippos: Plout., stoic, rep. 1078c. For cosmic god: F (1) ii 238-47. All is One:
perhaps going back to Xenophanes of Kolophon (c. 570-460), Diels Dox. 111,3
to 112, 2; also 565, 24 and 604, 18; Vors. fr. i, 40, 25; Plato soph. 242d; Norden
247 (1965 ed.); Orphic frag., Clement strom vi 259; gnostics, ib. iii 524.

48. Zaehner 200 ff claims for Zoroastrianism a kind of evolutionary concept:
no ref. to creator, everything seen as a process of becoming from a unitary infinite
and eternal Timespace (primal matter). Four stages lead to the full cosmos.

In general, for the nuances in the stress on the importance of the theoretic life and
the weak form taken by the “mixed life”: R. Joly, Le Thlme philosophique de Genres de
Vie 1956. Relations of slavery to all this: P. M. Schuhl, Machinisme et philosophic
ch. i, 1938; A. Aymard, ]. de Psychology 1948 3 29 ff; G. Vlastos, Philosoph. Rep. 1941
289-304 etc.

II. HISTORICAL REFERENCES

1. Koch no. 318 = Zonaras 1366 (dealing with molybdinon for molybdon ). Wilamo-
witz thinks it of unknown poet. Berg: lucerna, cf. Schol. Aristoph. clouds 1065.

2. Erman (6) 45; Lorimer 20 n 7. Cf. Erman (6) 31 n 5 of the divine serpent.
Pindar, Isth, v. Golden gods: P. Walcot, Hesiod and N.E. 1966 67.

3. Prob. from Larsa: Dussaud. Lorimer 16 f for exs. of part-gilt statues of deities,
or figures of gold, Ras Shamra, Egypt, Shushinak (Elamite), Phoinikia, nude goddess
with gold boss in navel (LAAA xxi 89 ff); Bel-Marduk in gold (Hdt. i 183 etc.);
cow of Mykerinos (Hdt. ii 129); golden calf of Israel. Gold in Min.-Myk. images;
Greek, 18-20. The Greek chrysos is Semitic: Assyrian hurasu, Aramaic hara, Hebrew
charuts.

4. Od. vi 229-35, cf. xxiii 159. Alkman, Lorimer 22, Diels, Vors. i 29 (23-4),
ultimate source Aristotle; Louk. Alex. 246. Divine kingship with gold animal;
gold=purple (Macr. Sat. iii 2, 1), Lorimer 32 f. Gold hair as divine attribute: A.
Alfoldi, Rom. Mitt. 1 1935 142 f; Caligula and gold beard. Suet. Cal. Iii.

5. Works and Days 109 ff. Dan. ii 31-5, cf. vii 1-10 where 4 winds and 4 great
beasts prelude the day of judgment. See also Hippol. in Dan. ii 13.

NOTES

397

396 NOTES

6. BC i 217 ff; ii 367. Yasht: i 1 ff, ii x 4 ff. Other Persian dreams: Windisch, 46 ff;
Cumont (1) 72 if; RE 430 f, sv Hystaspes, 542, 3 ff.

7. BC ii 218 f. Christian reuse of the system: Wickenhauser.

8. R (11) 39 ff with refs.; Ruska (2) 52; BC i 206.

9. Rep. 450b, with dyeing imagery in 430; Paroemiog. Gr. (Leutsch-Schneidewin)
i 46 and ii 91, 727. Deinarch, cited Harpokr. fr 6, 13. Souda sv.; Bekker, anec. gr. i
316 has gloss to gold-smelting = to go whoring. It would be going too far to see
there an anticipation of crucible or still as womb. The mockeries in the Souida
anecdote suggest a flyting rite.

10. Plin. xxxiii 103 f; MM v no and 95. Diosk. said to write also books on
Poisons, Poisonous Animals, Common (or Family) Medicines Simple and Com¬
posite. Herbal in Antiquity: Singer (1), 19-29 for Diosk

11. P. Holm. iv. 33 and ii 38; Synesios 68b and 69b; the two hydrarg., quicksilver
and metallic arsenic, Plin. xxxiii 6, 32, 99.

12. P. Leyd. 66 (Reuvens); B (2) 68 f. See also B (1) 83.

13. NH xxxiii 4. Lucan ix 424-5, “The earth is not cooked (smelted) for copper
or gold.” Apocoloc. iv (lines 6-9).

14. Manil. iv 243 ff.

15. Aetna 260-3; the imagery here however comes from greed-tortured man
identified with the earth he ravages.

16. Satyr. 76; cf. Columella iv 1, 7, “The soil of a trenched plot, newly broken up
and loosened, swells as if by some fermentum.” Also ii 14, 1 and xi 2, 13; Varro RR
i 38, 1; Plin. xvii 2, 2 (15); xxviii 8, 28 (109).

17. Col. ix 14, 6; i pref. 32, cf. i 1, 7, with Mago as to setting of vineyards; viii
8, 7, how to keep kestrels at home; xi 3, 2 (his Georgikon) as to garden walls; xi 3,
61, for doctoring seeds with juice of house-leek.

18. Col. xi, 3, 64; just before, he says seeds soaked in house-leeks are avoided by
caterpillars.

19. Col. vii 5, 17.

20. Plin. xxx 2; xxiv 17; xxv 2; Solin. iii (Saumaise 13).

21. Sen. ep. xv 32 f: Diels (5) ii ( 5 th ed.) 218 n. And Vitruv. praef. vii. See Kunz
16 for belief emeralds come from jasper. Ep. lxxix 14 for tale of Abderites thinking
D. mad and calling in Hippokrates to cure him. Plin. xxxvii 75 (197). Alch. MS
2327f 147’ Also BC i 194 f; Wellmann thinks Plin. is citing Baphika of Bolos.

22. Ail. v 39. Cf. Cramer, anec.gr. ii 235, 32; also Kore K. Tale taken on to Apion,
Horapollon (i 12 cf. i 17), Physiologus {i 2: 339 a 19 Pitra; 5, 1 Sbordone). See also
Plout, quaest . symp. iv 5, 2; Macr. sat. i 21,16 f; Solin, 27, 13 (Momm. 2nd ed. 219);
schol. 1 11 . xi 554; St. Eulog. of Alex (Pitra p. lxvi and 424 425b); F (2) iii p. ccvi.

23. Tac. ann. xv 14; also found as Pamenes and Pamenasis. MS 2327 f29; AG
46, 70; T (2) 118, no work of alchemist has come down. See also Synk. i 471 (Dind.)
+ BCii 31; Diels (2) 134 n 1; BCii 312 n 2; Gundel (3) 242. AG 49, 8 and 148, 15;
Pammegethous (not Pammenous); Steph. calls Demok. the pammegas (all-great):
Preisend. RE xviii 1633, 10; F (i) i 226 n; Lagerer. P. Plolm. 105 f.

Phimenas: Leyd. x 11, 15. Probably not the same.

Chaldeans: a tribe of lower Euphrates and Tigris; already C. is used for magician
in Book of Daniel. Especially famed for horoscopes: Bardasanes Spicilegium (Cureton)
15; Plout, de is. xlviii. A late Jewish book on Wisdom, God, star-motions, is called
Wisdom of the Chaldeans: Gaster PSBA 1900 338. Also Strab. xvi 1, 6; Ail. peri %oon,
A xxii (Hercher); Diod. ii 29; Lewy (2) 425-8.

24. Plin. ii 23; vii 49; Juv. vi 581. Plinius has “Petosiris, Nechepsos, the Pythago¬
rean Philosophers . ..”

25. Their system was that used by Dorotheus of Sidon, Firmicus Mat., Paulus
Alexandrinus: Bouche-L. 206—10; Ptol. tetrah. i 20; for frags., E. Reiss. Date:
Kroll (1); Neugebeuer (1) 5, 28, 185. Galen, simples x.

26. Frag. 1 (Reiss).

27. NH vii 49 (160).

28. Letter: 2419 £}z. Petasios: 2327 H50; 2249 f35v. Ostanes: 2249 £35 and 75;
Mark jv.

29. T (2)118.

30. See Athen. iii 114c (Aristoph., Daughters of Danaos ): “Sing too of our sour
( kyllestis ) and of Petosisis.”

31 Nechepso: Firm. Mat. iv 22, 2 = fr. 28, 4 = Reiss (2) 379. Stoics: Prantl,
Dent. Viertelj. (1856) 150. Ennius: Comm, in Eucan. Bern. (Usener); BC i 204 n. 1.
Plin. xx 1; Weidlich 1894 18 ff.

32. Epiktet., Nestle i 88 and ii 207; Stob. frags (Schweig) compares the gold¬
testing stone and the faculty of reason.

33. Face in moon xxi. See also cess. or. xxxi—iv and xlii: evaporation, also asbestos-
cloth. Face vii-viii on gravitation as sympathy, like to like.

34. Marc. Aur. iv 36 f; Lippmann (5) 14.

35. Origen, C. Cels, vi 22. T (1) 5 5 f; Cumont (3) ii 525 and (4) 122,145; Kroll (3)
63; Lobeck 932; Bousset (1) 165, 237; Cook, Zeus ii 129 etc.

36. Kronios-Noumenios: Prophyr. de antr. 21 ff (Leemans 148).

37. A sort of Pythagorean Platonist: Cumont (2) 107; Dill (1) 600; Julian v ijzze
etc. N. said that Plato was Moses talking Attic.

38. Vermaseren 157 etc. In gen., Cumont MMM i 36 ff; ii 30.

39. Elements: F (2) iv 45, nn. 206 f: fire as the one incorruptible element. Vermas¬
eren 158 f: cf. mosaic of 7 Gateways where we meet vessel and snake (appearing
from the rock) with raven or eagle on thunderbolt. Often a lion is by vessel and
snake. Vase, snake, lion, bird, bolt on Trier relief of M.’s birth.

40. Edsman (1) 222-4. Lion: Cumont (5) 406 f, also Eitrem (2) 43.

41. Later the scheme was made 12-fold under Zodiacal influence. Origen and
history: in Job. i 20; Angus 388. Ladder-symbols of ascent have a rich history from
Siberian shamanism etc. to Egypt, Orphism; taken into Christianity via J acob s Ladder.
Chitty 173 f. In Chald. oracles: precipice and seven-fold ladder: Lewy (2) 294, 412-5.

42. Face in moon 28, 943d; Kaibel epigr. gr , 650 and Cumont (2) 163; Haussouillier,
R. de Philol. xxxiii 6. See F (15) 174.

43. Reville, R elig, a Rome sous les Sevires 94; Julian 336c.

44. Tert. de cultu 2b; de idol, ix d; de cultu x; apolog. xxvc; and B (1) 12 f.

45. KK = CH xxiii 24, 4, 45; Scott iv 140 n. 1. The legend appears in the Syriac
Zosimos: B (4) ii 238.

46. Firm. Mat. v 6 (Kroll-Skutsch ii 3, 14); Louk. gall, xviii; Rev. Bib/, xlviii 46
n. 5; Scott iii 491-3.

47. F (1) 319; BC i index stelai; Boll (3) 7 f; cf. Plato, Krit. ii9cd; Ilekat. Abd.
264 F7, 4 i; F (1) i 230 n. 6.

Euhemeros: Jacoby RE sv, vi 963 f; FHG 263 Fi: Euhem. 63 T3, P 3C. 46, 3, 8.
Isis: Peek; Diod. i 27, 4.

48. Plato, ax. 371a; Cumont (2) 48 ff.

49. Face in moon xxvi, 942c; C (2) 196 n. 3 on night of demons serving Kronos
(943 d) in rlorth sea.

50. Frag. 3, P. Rain. col. ii 17-20 (106 Manteuffel).

, 51. CCAG vii 62 fi77 = viii 4, 105, 4; Cumont (2) 102 f; F(i) i 207 and 320.
CCAG vii 59 fi57: theosostos stolos. Boll suggests Trebizond coast in Pontos.

52. Tetrab. i 21 (47 f).

53. Delatte (9) 15, 11; F (1) i 322; Steele (4). For the stone, cf. the talismanic
monuments set up near towns by Arabs to ward off harm: Blochet 49. Al-Razi:
Ruska (9) esp. 240-2. For “jealous”, cf. 3 30 f. Arab Ghajat al-hakim (Latin, Picatrix ):
Ritter 34.

54. Delatte (9) 213; F (1) i 323. Boll (3) 136 f; Ruska (2) ch. iv, 61 ff. Arabs:
Blochet 29 f; Ritter 14. Balinos: CCAG v 1 (p. 98 n. 4) and Stapleton (2) 13 5. World-
end: see Asclepius xxvi (CH iv 330).

NOTES

399

398

55. PGM vii 862; viii 4 i;xxiva = OZii 2 9 8;iv883.F(i) i 323 and 287 f.CCAG viii
4 (p* I ° 5 > 1 * 0 s PGM xii 401. F (1) i 207 and 221 n. Lunarium, selenodromion , coll, of
passages for each day of moon-month. The names were symbolic and so could lead
to mistakes: F (1) i 222 n. 1.

56. KK 17 and 22, cf. CH lxv 7 f and box 6-11.

57. Enoch vii 1 (26, 2 f); viii 1, 3 f (26); 11-15; 17-20. Medicine: F (1) i 56-9 and

(5). Synkellos 26. The sin against the animals is eating them: Bousset (2) 165 ff. For
Enoch: Flemming-Radermacher; R. H. Charles ii 163 ff. Ethiopia: E. Sjoberg; also
see Lynn Thorndyke i 340, all ch. xiii. Asclepius 25; Doresse 209 (stress on metal¬
workers) CH viii 16 f and 14. Book of Enoch , lii 2; lxv 7—8; xviii; xxiv; xxxii_

mountains. Secrets of Enoch, xxvii—creation.

58. Enoch viii (26, 11 R.). Ethiopian adds paignia as does Bolos, Phys. baph., AG
242, 10 (Hermes). Wellmann (1) 68; Diels (2) 128; F (1) i 223.

39. Poim. i 4. A.uthentia: CIG 2701, 9 (Mylasa); P. Lips, xxxvii 7 (4th c.) CH i 2;
Zos. (hist.) ii 33.

60. KK xxiii 14-6, xf. xxiii etc. Psychosis: CH iv 28 n. 33.

61. CE x. 62, 66.

62. De Buck 47; Drioton 114 f; Doresse 272 and 106, Medinet Habu, alleged
Jewish influences in Hermetic cosmogonies, Poim. iii, cf. J. Kroll (2) 139.

63. Diod. i 7, 1; G. Thomson 157 thinks this the Ionian type of thinking. F (2)
iii 66 f, fr. xv. Yeast in Iranian cosmog., L. A. Campbell, Mithr. Iconog. 1968 109.

64. Sympnoia is esp. a Stoic notion. Date of treatise: Doresse, 275.

65. Spell, Lexa ii 146 (Lond. & Leyd. P. 19, 32 to 19, 4). Simplik.: T (2) 30.

66. Meteor, iv; Farrington (2) 42.

67. Plants iii 23, 4, cf. Galen xi 433. The passive appears with Diodoros etc.

68. Diod. ii 32; cf. Heliod. Aith. ii 30, 1.

III. MORE HISTORICAL REFERENCES

I. Enn. vi 7, 22; Br6hier (2) 43; Rist 97. Gold: enn. i 14, 23; Breh. (2) 33. Souls:
enn. iv 3, 2 f and 5; iv 8, 6, soul as active organising principle.

. 2 - Peregr. xxvii. Anistemi: II .xxiv 331 and Aisch. Ag. 1361. Wake up; II , x 32 etc.;
disease. Soph. Tr. 979. Em. ii 4.

3. Pers. sat. ii 38; Petron. satyr. 58, 6; Lorimer 21 n. 2.

4. Iren, i 6, 2.

5. De myst. v 23; iii 27.

6. Ib . vii.

7. Eunap. Lives Phil. 458; cf. Plato phaid. 64b for laughter. Boissonade 15.

8. Ib. 459 and 473.

9. MS 2327 f 266 f. Amm. Marc, xxx 1, 16.

10. Lippmann (1) i 103 ff; B (1) 72. Reproduced by Souda.

II. Bolland. Julii 11, 557a; B (1) 72 f.

12. Paul. sent, v 23 and leg. Cornel, de Sic. et venef.-. Cod. Greg, xiv, tit. de malef. 6.

13. Rauschen 127; Boissier ii 271, 296; CTxvi 19, 10 (20 Feb. 391); Constantius
CT ix 16, 4; ix 16, 8. Amm. Marc, xxvi 3; Zos. (hist.) iv 13: fear of conspiracies.

14. RA xxx 1924 144.

13. CT ix 21, 1; Grierson 231 f. Bronze counterfeiting seems not always covered
by legislation or the jurists’ lawbooks.

16. CT ix 21 3 and 6: the latter, to the P.P.ofthe West, may have been issued Nov.
348, prob. from somewhere in Asia Minor.

17. Digest xlviii 10, 9 (Alexandreia): Dutilh, Grierson 244.

18. CT ix 21, 2; S. Reinach 215; E. Thomson 36. Liban. Or. xviii 138.

19. SHA Aurel. xxxviii 2; S02. HE v 15; R. MacMullen, Enemies of Lome, 177.

20. Order: Oxy. 1411. Matt, xxii 15-22; Doresse 72. Pap. from Panopolis (Dublin)

NOTES

1964 ii 215 ff (pp. 147 f); and Yale (Beinecke) pap. (1967) no 79. Argyrion, Johnson
and West, Currency in R. and By%. Eg. 1931* See also Michaelidae no 12. For doubts as
Diocletianic suppression: W. J. Wilson, Osiris 1936 ii 262. Magic: P. Mag. Eeid. W.
14, 38,

21. T (1) 18 f; B (1) 239; F (1) i 275 f and 363 f. Third text: Olympiod. F (1) i
276 n. 2. Smelting, epsesis ; series of ops., akolouthia.

22. Diod. iii 11, cf. v 38 on Spanish silver-mines; G. Thomson (1) 242 f. Cumont
(1) 97 n. 2 and 49 (monopoly); under Tiberius, a metallarches in charge: Letronne rec.
i 143 and 454; OGI 660, 2. Generally workers in mines were free from 4th c.,
A. H. M. Jones, Econ. Hist. Rev. 1936 197.

23. Recipes: Browne (1) 202; T (4) 49. Making of silver: poUsis.

24. Firm, iii 15 in nono loco', iv 16. And B (1) 74 and 32. Olympiodoros (Fabricius
v ch. 6) attribs lead to Kronos, electrum to Zeus, gold to sun, bronze (copper) to
Aphrodite, tin to Hermes, silver to moon. Cf. Mark f6 (Ares iron).

23. Prok. in rem.publ. 70 (ii 234, 17).

26. In Tim. Comm. 24b (i 43, 1); S (1) 59 f; B (1) 48 f.

27. Ib. 337e (iii 321, 24); S (1) 60.

28. BC i 246 n. 1; Boll (2) 153 ff.

29. Letrab. i 2 (2, also 3 and 8). Aither is the 5 th element.

30. Poikilos and its relation to Dionysiac and alchemic concepts of dynamic
change: JL (4), esp. 380 ff.

31. Pupil of Hierokles and friend of Prokopios. For the rel. to Zachanas and the

the group of Severos of Antioch, Chitty 104 f. Authorship of works of “Dionysios”,
Chitty 120 n. 59. For Aineias: Sheldon-Williams 484—8, with refs; ps.—Dionysios,
$.457-72,323-5. _

32. Theophrastos (Barthius 1635) 71; B (1) 74 r.

33. Ib. 76. Colorent is from Boissononade edition; also Galland.

34. Fourth praxis: MS 2317 f5o; Ideler ii 213.

35. Monceaux 124 f; Edsman 168; Crutwell 97. When P. was stabbed, his blood
spirted out and extinguished the fire.

36. Euseb. HE iv 13; Amelineau 411; Bardenhewer ii (2nd ed.) 670; W. Reuning,
7 .ur Erklarung d. P. martyriums 1917.; H. Muller, Rom. Quartalschr. xxii 1908 8,
Knopf-Kruger, cf. Apoc. i 15, Ausgewahlte Mdrtyrerakten 1929 3. f.

37. Edsman (2) 91 and (1) 171; Moberg 31.

38. Greg. 2, 301b; Guignet 147.

39. De trin. 34; PL xvii 545b. Edsman (1) 196 f, and (3).

40. PL xvii 544c.

41. Kedrenos 339a; Malal. 395, 8; Theoph. I28d.

42. S (1) 158-60; Philop. meteor. 47, 18; de opificio mundo iv 12 (184, 26); Simplik.
de caelo 89, 4.

43. S (2) 102; Philop. de anima 120, 34. He accepts Aristot. idea of metals from
enclosed “vaporous exhalations,” Meteor, iii 6.

44. Browne (1) 213 f.

45. Scaliger: Euseb. Chron. Animad. 1606 258; synkellos means personal attendant
on a patriarch etc.

46. B (1) 130 f.

47. Oxy 467; for stypteria note P. Holm. 16, 32; see also for alum monopoly, Oxy.
1429 and 2116.

IV. THE NAME ALCHEMY

1. Aristot. HA 550b 27; Diod. xvii 75; Aik. i 23; Ptol. tetr. 19; ingots, IG vii
303, 104, 442 B6 and 1432 AB i 17; Agathark. 28.

2. Synk. (Dindorf) 24; Diels (2) 109; B (2) 94 Olymp.; John. fr. 15, 3 (FHG iv
548); Souda sv deras. Chemeia'. anon Incred. 3 cod. fr. 165 (FFIG iv 601); cod. Paris.,

4°° NOTES

Suda sv Dioldetianos and cbemeia. Iliad, xviii 470 ff; Hes. theog. 863 ff. Choaneuein-
Aristoph. thesm. 57 cf. 62.

3. Zos l.c. and B (2) 169, 172; Olymp. B (2) 84. Chymia-. Hoffmann in Leidenburg,
Hut. d. Chemie 1884 ii 516 f, 525. Zos. B 220. Chemeutikos : Olymp. B 80; cheim —.
Souda sv Zosimos.

4. Stephanides (6) derives chyma from chymeuein, to prepare a chyma , but the word is
not found. Chymeusis is found in EM 630, 52; Eustath. 826, 16; Tzet. ad Hes. sc. 122.
Zacharias assumes chymeutes to be a Hellenistic term for a man preparing foods and
medicines, 119 and 124. Further, Strange 3. See Liddell-Scott for other
terms.

5. Partingdon (1); Mahdihassan (1) 93 f for details.

6. He is. xxxiii. R (1) 140, to Isis. Attrib of land: Phil. Bybl. in Euseb. Praep. Ev
i 10, 38.

7. Athen. xiii 603 f to 604b. Place and date: Thoukid. i 116. In Eunapios, Lives
Phil. 459, the Eros raised by Iamblichos has golden hair, the Anteros has black hair.

8. KK 32 and PGM vii 492 f.

9. Zielinski takes as chemia-, also F (8) 116; but F (2) iii p. clxiv—viii, the Land is
preferred. Note Lippmann seems in error in linking koptic chomnet (copper) with
chyma-. Forbes (1) ix 60.

10. F ( J ) i 253 ff; Scott iv 145 ff.

11. F (2) iii p. clxviii; R (1) 137-43.

12. Doresse 107; F (1) i 288; PGM xiii 14 ff. Book of Moses: PGM xiii, Leyd. W.
Hermetic school with Books of Thoth: Dieterich (2) 165. Stephanos: T (4) 43 f.
There is an odd sign that may be “rainwater”.

Ostanes used only the metallurgical way: B (2) iii 61 n. 3 and i 59 ff. Note Ep. to
Leukippos (BC i 201), where Demok. rejects the way of the Egyptians: B (2) ii 53
8 ff (badly edited), 855, 22, “We don’t do it like that.” Also Riess (4) 1344, 36 ff’
More on Ostanes: BC ii 331; AG 264, 19.

13. Lexa ii 174; Leyd. i 385, 1, 11 to 14, 12.

14- R (1) 187.

15. MS 2327 f 214V and 129; 2250 fi63; Mark 178. MS 2327 f 2 6o.

16. B (1) 171.

17. Revillout, RHR 4th s. viii 423. Letter of D.: AG 53 ff; Diels (5) 68, 55; B (1)
300, cf. DL ix 34. Plato and mages of Phoinikia: BC ii 40. Date of text: Reiss (4)
1344, 30 ff thinks Synesios knew it. See BC ii 314 n. 1 and cf. Zos. AG 220

18. Rufin. HExi 26.

19. Harmann.

20. Erman (4) v 130, 12; 128, 12.

21. Forbes (5).

22. P. Masp. 107, 13 (6th c.) and perhaps P. Flor. 286, 23 (also 6th c.).

23. Arist. HA 554 a 13; 596 bi7; Theophr. HP ix 1, 1. Animals: Arist. HA 556
b22; PA 676a 16. General, Mel. 38062, 32. Taste, phys. 24539.

24. Tetrab. xix.

25. Gildetmeister 536; Mahdihassan (1) 84, to whom I owe these plant—refs.

26. Mukand Singh 19; Mahdihassan (1) 83 f.

27. Ramsey 161—70 for refs. Also a large altar with papai only at Veteston Sinamli
(AJA xxxvi 460). Hierapolis: Ruge sv H. in RE; Humann, Altert. v. Hierap. (text,
Judeich; comment. Cichorius, 50 f); CB i 119; ii 545; Waddington no 227. Ramsey
thinks Jewish. Notes poppies on bronze coins, John Hyrkanos 135-06 b.c. : Lewin
36. Shamans or prophets and drugs: A. R. Johnson, Cultic Prophet in Anc. Israel
1962 20—1, also G. Sandulescu (collective intoxication by honey at time of the
Anabasis, La Presse Medicals lxxiii (no 36) 28 Aug.~4 Sept. 1965 2070.

28. Ramsey suggests pappa underlies words and names such as Peperion
Paphylos, Papoukome Chorion (CIG 9731, 8), Pappaios Zeus (Skythian). Zeus
Papamios (God of dead, Bithynian). For threptos, Ramsay 52.

NOTES 4 QI

Hemp (used by Skythians as drug) grown in Asia Minor, Mesopot., Egypt in b.c.
period: Forbes (1) iv 1956; H. Gordon, Antiquity xli 1967 42-9; M.I. Artamonov,
Sc. American 1965 212: 5, 101; Ellis 32.

Opium well-known as drug and medicine in ancient world: Ellis 44-52, evidence
from Swiss lake-villages, Plinius, Celsus, Dioskorides, Diokles, Galen, Rufus of
Ephesus. Plin. xx 76; Xen. banquet ii; Plin. xxv 17; Loukian True History has City
of Sleep surrounded by forest of poppy and mandragora, etc.

29. Kerenyi fig. 40.

30. Mahdihassan (2) 51 ff; G. Thomson (1) fig 4 etc.; Strong 130 pi. 16; Blumel,

Gr. Skulpt. d. sechsten u.fuenf. Jabrhund. v. Chr. A120np.11 and plates 22-4.

31. G. Thomson 219; Mahdihassan (2) 54. Note N. Gerard (Mykenean doc. about
perfumery) AC 1966 xxxv 207-9

32. JL (1) 181-3 citing Apoll. Rhod.; in general, 174 f.

33. Exhort. 16; Cook, Zeus, i 107 f; JL 185 f.

34. P. Roussel; Eliade (1) 70.

35. H. von Fritze, Z.f. Num. 1904 pi. 5, 27; L. Forrer, Cat. Weber Coll, no 2291
and 2298; gem, Furtwangler, Beschreibung no 7361. Bonner (1) 326 and 265.

36. Bonner (1) 100 f; and Derchain (2) nos 325, 327 (both of Psyche, see here ch.
vi n. i j). For early Iron-works in Ida: Homeric Epig x. (ix): “Another sort of pine shall
bear a better fruit [iron] than you on the heights of furrowed windy ida. For there
shall mortal men get the iron that Ares loves . . .”

37. For direct alchemic rels., Alleul.

! 38. Kerenyi 177-80. Clem . protr. ii 21, 3; Arnob. ad. nat. v 26; Hymn 280 f also

! 47, 50, 200 f; Ovid met. v 450: Plin. xviii 72. Fermentation: A. N. Skias, Eph. arch.
1901 19 ff; against, J. N. Svoronos, ]. Inst, d’ arch. num. iv 1901 179 and R. Leonard,
RE Memos xi 323, on ground that there was no time for fermenting in the Hymn. But
a mythical account need not take time into account. Drink out: Delatte (11) 39.

39. Pindar fr. 114c Bowra; Q. Sm. ii 182. (Plout. Perik. 38, illness.) Herakleitos:
Plout. degarr. 511c; Diels Vors. A 3b; K. Freeman (1) 105. Hipponax: Anth. lyr. fr.
42. Effects: A. Hoffman in Kerenyi; Delatte (11) 38-40. Baumeister thought
aphrodisiac {Hymn. hom. 300); R. Pettazoni, slightly intoxicating; others confuse
with poppy: O. E. O. Brien; Magnien; M. S. Lagrange, Rev. Bibl. 1929, 73; see also
Ovid fasti iv 531; Loisy suggests a fertility-charm.

40. Omnimorbia-. Isid. of Seville, orig. xvii 9, 63; see also Diosk. iii 31; Plin. xx
152 and 156 (wild, the same); Ps-Apul. herb. 93 (Howald and Sigerist 168); carmen
graecum de virt. herb. 12; Hippok., Littr6, sv index.

Kykeon thought to quench thirst, Nikandr. met. = Anton. Lib. 24 and Lactant.
Plac. v 5; cf. Hippok. de morb. mul. iii 17 (L. vii 161). Pancea: H. Leclerc, Bull, des sc.
pharmac. xxxix 1932 184-90 and Precis dephythotherapie (1935 3tded.) 148; A. M. van
Prooijen, Pharm. Tidsch. v. Belgien 1950 11.

41. Kerenyi (2) 3 4 ff; Harpokration sv Nike Athene; Paus. ii 174; Paestum: Kerenyi
(3) 195 f; Saflund 55 and fig. 50. Note also how poppy is assoc, with Demeter
(mainly), jKybele, Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite: Murr 183 ff; Steier. Note Mykenean
ring: Evans JHS xxi (1901) 108; P. of M. i 341 Dussaud (2) 392; Karo 149.

42. Schol. Loukian dial, meret. vii 4; Artemid. i 73; Paus. viii 37, 7; Porph. de
abs. iv 16. Haloa: Schol Loukian l.c.-, Jane Harrison, Proleg. 145-50 etc. Seeds:
Clem. protrep. ii 19, 3; Euseb. pr. ev. ii 3, 28; Deubner Att. Feste 58.

43. Paus. ix 25, 1; Philost. imag. ii 29, 4.

44. Apollod. bibl. i 4, 3; Kerenyi, Gods 203 (Pelican ed. 179); Paus. iii 22, 11; viii
28, 3; Dionys. de aucup. 7.

45. Kerenyi (1) 135 for links with Rheia (Rhea); Diod. v 62, 1 f; Sch. Lykophr.
570; Ovid met. xii 652-4. Link with apples and figs, Kerenyi 134; Dionysos, wine
apple and pomegranate on Ark of Kypselos etc; Melos, called after apple, had pom.
on coins. Cook iii 1, 817. Kerenyi fig. 41, TC (late classical or soon after) of girl
kneeling (with Eros) on half of a pomegranate, revealing herself. See further.

4° 2

NOTES

Rohde, Psyche (Fr. version, Reymond) 198 n. 5; 75 113; 119; 130 n. 6; 138; Plin.
xxiii 6 (59) no; Heckenbach, de sacra nud. 84.

46. Mart. Cap. ii 109 f; Boyance (1) 95; Plin. xxiv 101, also xx 20; Carcopino RA
1923 1-22; Basilique etc 1926 380; Hubaux, Musee beige 1926 197 IF and 1928 herbe aux
cent tetes (tries to distinguish seryngo and leucas). See Delatte (4), cf. Kyranides
(Mely) 1 7, 2 and Delatte 480.

47. Boyance (4).

48. Plin. xx 20; Disok. iii 21 (Wellmann ii 27). Damaskios: Phot. cod. 243 (310,
10).

49. Psell. vii 478 (Kroll); Od. x 305 and 268 if. Theophr. ix 15, 7; Diosk. iii 54.
Pythags. on moly as immortality or transformation: Boyance (4) 213 f. Interpolator
also calls it himertos, cf. Orphic tablet, Kern 32c (line 7).

50. Boyance (4) 216 f; Carcopino, basilique 293. For leap, Roscher sv Ceukas. For
L. as Country of the Dead: E. Janssens, AC 1961 xxx 381-94.

51. Read 13.

52. Plin. xxi 19, 6; see note 32 above.

53. AG 48; T (2) 130; Lagercrantz P. Holm. p. 191.

34. Anagallis : Synesios, AG 66, 9 and Zos. 160, 7; Moses, 306, 24. Plants in
magic: Berl. pap. ii 35.

Leyd. mag. pap. v has symbolic names for plants and stones.

33. Partingdon (2) 8; Forbes (1) i 100 f.

56. B (1) 123; MS 2327 f 268-78 etc.

57. Mahdihassan (1). Lippmann thought alchemy proper reached China from
west in 8c after Kanton opened to foreigners; first Arab ship there a.d. 714. Rich¬
thofen also thought like that and considered the Chinese forged all the documents,
ascribing antiquity to them or interlarding passages in genuine works. See Holm-
yard (4) 23. Also Eliade 190-2 for refs. For the terms: Dubs (2) 33-5; B. Karlgren,
Grammata Serica nos 652a and 8oon (8oon and 686f). Lie-sein Juan (M. Kartenmark,
Le Lie-sien tchouan 1953). T’ang emps.: Y’ang-shu 3:12 a (Be-na ed.). T’ang graves
have many images of moslem and other foreigners. For Chinese rels. with Syria
and India; Needham (i)i 150 on; also here ch, x nn 44-7. Rhytons: ILN Arch.
Sect. 2266 (22 April 1967) figs. 6-8.

58. Eliade (1) 131 and (5) 278 f.

59. Shatapatha Pathmana xxi 7, 1, 7. Indian alchemy, refs. Eliade (1) 192-4. Indian
atomism, Loring 1.

60. Mahdihassan (1) 85, also citing Mrs. Postans, Cutch , 197.

61. N. R. Dhar, 1952: Mahd. 85.

62. Mahd. 85-9 for fuller discussion.

63. Christensen i 22; Schaeder 225-9, es P- 2Z % £

64. Zath-sparam x 2; Christensen 23, 25 and 52 (diamond). Partingdon (1) 297
and 417.

65. Zaehner 267.

66. Zaehner 88. See 85-94, Indian parallels etc. For Soma: E. G. Wasson,
Soma the Divine Mushroom . . . (also on Chinese ling chi and Manichees).

In general: support of chemia, Lippmann (1) i 292-8; Gundel (3) 240 f. For
chymia-. Diels (2) 123 f. See further Ciba Symposium-, 1940 322.

V. DEMOKRITOS AND BOLOS OF MENDES

x. MS. 2327 fi63; Mark f79; B 1 (1) 127-9; E (1) i 2 4 ° £

2. Mark fjv.

3. Paris MS: B (1) 129; AG 25. Could Thrace refer to Abdera, looking back to
Demokritos ?

4. Euseb. HE i 4.

NOTES 4°3

5. Sen. de ira ii 10; Ail. VH iv 20. Aim: DL ix 45; Cic. de fin. v 29. Life: Cic.
I.C A Aul. Gel. X 17; DL ix 36; Cic. Tusc. v 39; Plin. xxviii 16 (58).

6. Cic. de fin. v 19; Strab. xvi 703.

7. Diod. i 98, 3; Ail. VH iv 20; DL ix 35; Clem, strom. i 304; Iambi, de myst.ss
(Egypt). D. and astron., Olmstead, H. of Pers. Emp. 33 I- 4 2 -

8. Theophr. de sensu 75. For aphorisms, Diels, who defends authenticity: note
B 35 (1834 ed. W. Kranz). Aristotle on D.: Santillana 147. D. wrote On Pythagoras,
and Thrasyllos called him a Pythagorean. In general T. Cole, Democritus and the
Sources of Greek Anthropology 1967.

9. Plin. xxx 2, 8-11 (also on Ostanes).

10. Philops. 32 f. , T-. , , \

11. Plout. quaest. corn, viii 102 (Diels, vors. 55a 77). Dodds (1) 369; Delatte (7)
46 ff. This is a theory of telepathy; where senders are inanimate, it is clairvoyance.
There is also a creed of divine eidola to explain precognition: fr. 166.

12. Q. Com. v 7, 6; Dodds (1) 370. Clement, Bxh. v, says Leukippos and Metro-
doros “inculcated 2 first principles: fullness and vacuity. D. of Abd., while accepting
these two, added the eidola.”

13. DL ix 38. ,, , ,

14. See Souda and Eudokia’s Violarium-, Steph. Byz. sv Apsynthios; schol.

Nikandr. theriak 764; Plin. xxiv 102 (160-3).

15. Vitruv. ix 2; Diels vors 68 (55) B300 (5th ed. ii 210); Wellmann (1) 10.

16. Aristot. meteor, ii 1, 6: using cheirokmeta for devices raising water above its
level.

17. Plin. xxiv 99 (156).

18. JL (1)182.

19. Plin. xxiv 102 (160); he goes on about a contracting flower and a spiderkilier,
from Apollodoros, “a follower of D.” Trachinia, xxxvii, 114 (Hi). “ l think it
untrue, and the assurance of D. fantastic, that, used as an amulet, it consumes the
spleen in 3 days.”

20. Plin. xxxv 5 (13 f). Bird: x 40. Tylon: JL (1) 213. Glaukos: ib 58,109, 209-20,
224 f, 228, 235, 382.

21. Plin. xxviii 29 (112-8) says D. wrote whole book on chamaeleon, giving
separate attention to each part of its body. See 27 (92-106) on hyena, to which
magi attributed great power “to take away the senses and entice men . Touc
doorposts with its blood and mages are made powerless. More on mages, 57 ( ZOI )>
56 (198), 12 (17). And xxx 24 (82) and (84). Tales about snakes: viii 22 (61) and x
70 (137). Cham, plant seems pinethistle or black type (prob. Cardopatium

corymbosum). v ,

22. Plin. xxvi 9 (18-20). On mages he may draw on Peri Magou of Apion: Well-

mann (10) 217; Messina (2) 25 f; BC ii 1 f. ,

23. Galen, simples 6 (xi 793 K); Delatte (6) 64, 90. Wellmann (6) and (7) shows
lists of names of Greek, Latin, barbarian tongues in Diosk. were not in original
but added gander Empire; Pamphilos may be source. Note Plinius uses magi in
wide sense to cover magicians of Arabia, Egypt etc. but must be largely dealing
with mages proper. For Persian plant-beliefs, Carnoy HERE sv Magic 295 f; Wessely
(3). Bolos not a forger: Kroll (4) 238.

Plinius may have used a Latin intermediary (PValgius Rufus): BC 1 119. Or may
have drawn from Anaxilaos of Larissa, who drew from Bolos. This is unlikely but
see Wellmann (1) 48 ff and (8) 148. Anaxilaos: F (1) i 222.

Date of Bolos: Kroll (4) 230 f; Wellmann (9) 5-16; Preisendanz RE xvm 1629,
22 (Ostanes) denies any rel. of Bolos and ps.-D.; Hammer-Jensen RE Suppl. .
iv 222-67 dates ps.-D. 5 th c. a.d. (!). See also B. E. Perry; Hammer-J. (2); BC l
118; Jacoby FGH 263. F (i) i 2206 sees the line as Bolos, Anaxilaos, an Egyptian
artisan (PPhimeneus), then editor of P. Leyd; and B., Anax., J. Sextus Africanus,
and editor of P. Holm. Anaxilaos: Cramer, Astrol. in R. Caw 85 f.

STOKE-Of

404

NOTES

24. AG 41-53; Comm, by Synesios, 57-69. Ps.D.: Lippmann (1) i 27-46; BC
i 198-207. 210 f; F (i) i 224.

25. Matter of goldmaking: hyle, cf. Galen lx 494 with hyle as totality of medical
matters.

26. F (1) i 197 and (2) iii 396 (326); Wellmann (9) 4; Rohr 77-86. Use of theios,
Rohr 86-8.

Examples of physika-. Ps.-Manethos, 2nd-ist c. BC; Nigidius Fig.; Demetrios
physikos, Plin. viii 59; Apollodoros, Plin. xxiv 59, under Tiberius; Xenokrates of
Aphrodisias, under Nero; Pamphilos, Gepon. xv 1, 6; HT with Koiranides, end
of 1st c.; Polles of Aigai on sympathies-antipathies; Neptunalios, physika, c. 120;
Aelius Promotus, physika dynamera (natural symp. remedies); Apollonios (Balinas of
Arabs: seems A. of Tyana, CCAG vii 174 f, Thorndyke, Hist, of M. i 267, ii 234 f);
agronomist Didymos, 3rd c.; veterinary Apsyrtos, 4th c., Syria, Caesarea; ps.-
Aristotle, Book of Things in Nature, c. 600, Syria—of it, Tiber Aristotelis de lapidibus is
apart: Wellmann (1) 3 f; also work on animals by Timotheus of Gaza, under
Anastasios I: Wellmann (4) 23 ff.

27. AG 57, 11 f; BC ii 313, 10.

28. AG 53, 16 f; MS 2327 f 258.

29. F (1) i 225; Lippmann (1) i 34 and 217; Diels (2) 128. Klaudianos, not a proper
name, cited 11 times. B thinks a copper-lead alloy plus perhaps zinc, cf. aes Claudianum
etc. But it is classified with minerals.

30. AG 26, 1; PGM vii 862.

31. Lakshmi: Goosens CE xxxiv 1942 321; Maiuri le arti Jan. 1939; Zanotti-
Bianco JHS lix 227 f; Ippel, Forsch.u.F. xv 26 1936 325-7; Arch. An%. 1939 370;
GBA 1939 i 234; Wheeler (2) 135 etc.

32. AG 42, 2 ff; BC ii 317, AG, with 211-21, A3-7, for more texts on evocation
of O.; Preisendanz (2); F (1) i 228 f. Evocation: Hopfner (3) and magic (1) ii par.
328-76. Stapleton (4) 29 n. 8 thinks the tale unknown to Zos. and thus later than
a.d. 300, but such argument has little weight. Temple of 'Memphis (Ptah): in
Synes. BC ii 313; Kees RE Memphis 678, 25 ff, citing Lucan vi 499 f; also B (2) ii
214, 14 (Hephesteia) and Book of Krates: B (3) iii 61 (noname); B (2)ii26, 248; Kees
45 -

Jesus: Sayings of Our Lord 1897, Frowde 12; New Sayings 1904 13. Dedicated quest:
Nock (5) 107 ff; Loukian Menippos; tale of 3 proselytes (Goldfahn Monats. f.G.
u.Wiss d. Jud xxii 1873 52; Confessio of Kyprian of Antioch {Op. 1758 1105); Acta
Sanct. Sept vii 222; Loukian Nigrinor, Justin dial.c. Tryph. 2-8; vision of Mandoulis,
Nock (6). In gen., F (1) i 45 ff, 309 ff.

33. F (2) i 16 {Poim. 27-30); Lewy 91 n. 2; R (1) 337, 20 and 365. Setheans, Hippol.
v 19, 21 (W. 120, 25). Scott: “I inscribed in my memory” could mean “I set down
in writing for myself,” cf. Oxy. 1381, 166, after vision of Asklepios. Silence CH
treatises x 5; xiii 2, vii 3; Porphyr. de abs. ii 34; Cumont AJA xxxvii 1933 263; O.
Casel, etc.

34. F (2) i 27; Poim. 30; Iren, i 21, 5 (H. i 14, 4); John x 10, cf. prophet (Orig.
c.Cels. vii 9). “Bearing taphysika ” means bearing the holy things (of the mysteries).

35. F(i)i332f. The polemic seems interpolated; one of the few alchemic passages
where word sympatheia is used; alchemists prefer syngeneia, or use marriage-
imagery: Rohr 75 f; ps.-D. 51, 6; Kleo. 294, 28 etc. Diels (2) 131 notes we must
translate “a nature”, not “the nature”. For Synes.: AG 57, 13; BC ii 312, Aqa;
Christian, AG 359, 9; BC ii 321 A8. In gen., Kopp 130; Diels (2) 131; Lagercrantz
P. Ho/m. p. no.

36. 428, 15; F (1) i 253.

37. B (3) iii 57; BC ii 320, Aj.

38. Stapleton (2) 135, MS of Rampur; cf. Ruska (10) i 205 with n. 2.

39. JL (1) 149 and 187 f. Apollobex: BCii 13 n. 19; 15 n. 3; 309. Also Reiss RE
i 2847, 39.

NOTES

405

40. R (1) 163 n. 4; Wellmann (10) 68 (55) B300, 13 p. 217; and (9) 15 n. 8; also
(11) 12 f n. 6; 14 n. 7. I Kings iv 27 (31); Jos. Ant. Jud. viii 2, 5 (43); Fulgent.
{Mythog. lat. 141) says D. published a magical treatise Dynamera.

41. Dardanos: next chapter for Sword. Also BC ii 15, B3; 288 line 17; R (1) 163
n. 4; Wellmann RE iv 2189; Wunsch; Delatte mus. beige xvii 1914 no 26 p. 64;
Hubert, Diet. Antiq., Magia 1504b. Also, Col. x 357 ff; Dieterich (3) 4 f; Apul.
apolog. xl; BC ii 289 n. 5; Tertul. de anima lv 5.

42. St Gall: Boll (3) 137; BC ii 14 n. 22.

43. AG 2220, 8; and BC ii 308 (PGM i p. 135).

44. Apotelesmat. v (93, 1832 ed.); B (1) 38; Steele 4. Iambi, de myst. i 2, cf. viii 5.

45. Ant. Jud. i 2, 8.

46. Fabric, cod. ps.-VT 1713 147 ff; CCAG ii 182, 26; v 1, 118 n. 1; v 3, 136, 13
and 140, 1; vii 87, 3; viii 1, 160. Apoc. Mosis (Tischendorf) 19; Joel, chron. (Bekker)

34; BC i 45. Seth as founder of astronomy, Malalas, 5, 20 (Bonn): Kuhn in
Festg. R.v.Rotb. 1893 219.

47. CCAG viii 4, 102 f. Seth as Zoroaster: Bousset (3) 381, 2: Windisch (2) 24.
Sethean gnostics: BCi 46; influenced by Iranian dualism: Bousset (3) 119 f and 378.

48. BC i 46 and 5 3; ii 118-20. They wait age on age in grotto of Mt of Victory
for the Star. Matth. 1-11 on mages; Messina (3); BC i 51. Zoroaster christianised by
gnostics BC i 54; attacks on mages, 55.

49. Lippmann (3) 24; Horten 66; Edrisi, Geog. (Jaubert 1836) i 125.

50. Ahmun: Sigge, Islam xxiv 1937 287 and 299; Lippmann (3) 24 f also for
Bailak of Cairo (13th c.) and Ibn Battata (14th). Psellos: Ruska (2) 61 f and 155 ff;
Lippmann (1) ii 207; BC ii 309 f; CMAG vi 32, 15 ff. Arabs: F (1) i 321 f; Ruska
(2) 73-9; 109; 113 f and 181; 138 f. Krates B (3) iii 44-75. Book hidden in cave or
chamber, oft with motive of revealing god or angel: Picatrix (Ritter p. 27-9; M.
Plessner; R (7) 113, told by Hermes, cf. R (7). Balinas on Talismans; MS of Treasure
of Alexander ; discovery of book. Secret of Creation, in secret chamber.

51. Numa, near end; Delatte, Bull. ac. r. beige CL Feb. 1936; R (11); Ruska (2)

52. Discovery in Egypt of old books: CCAG vii 4, 102 f; Kroll RE sv HT 794, 22 ff
and 802, 29; Roussel BCR 1929 143.

52. Erman (5); Lexa ii 231.

53. JL (1) 4 of; Paus. viii 15, 1 f. Arkadia was an area where rites could survive
directly from Myk. world.

Some more details on stelai etc. Doresse 188-90, A Revelation by Dositheos on the y
Stelai of Seth. (A Dositheos was said to be master of Simon Magos; Philastros cites
a D. on his catalogue of heresies, straight after Setheans: Puech (2) 124 n. 6). Stelo-
graphiai: AG 264, 19; BC ii 331 (9).

Note the conflict of Seth and Hermes: Doresse 190 and 107. Synkellos hands over
to Hermes the stelai of Seth: Scott iii 391; Doresse (4) 62.

Clearly much of the mystery about stelai etc. grew from broodings over the
hieroglyphs which men could not read: Sbordone (1) intro, and F (1) i 278 n. 3.

VI. MORE ON BOLOS

1. AG 167, 20 ff. F (1) i 233 f argues these chapters are only an extract from a
work by Zos. Also Mark fi4iv-i6iv; here H49V. Our Lead: 49, 1. Primary matter:
52, 6 f and Lippmann (1) i 34 f. Bits of P. & M. in Turba: Ruska 275.

2. Book of the Sanctuary cited as source of recipes for making emeralds and
hyakinths: 2325 fi6o v and 2327 H47. In general: Forbes (1) i 136.

3. Leyd. Pap. 1347/x 112; Lexa ii 57. Apepi: 8-13; Lexa ii 98.

4. B (1) 31. Iosis T (2) 133; A. J. Hopkins (5); T (1) 49.

5. JL (1) 210 f and 57; Attis: Delcourt (1) 32. Herakleides speaks of the empyro-
mantis of the Iamides, so they were closely connected with fire: Schol. Pind. 01 .

NOTES

406

vi 119 (i 180 Drach.) and Hepding RE Iamos 687, 33. The white ios is said to be the
gillyflower; the dark, the violet. The violet is often linked with Persephone’s rape
and blood, cf. what said of the pomegranate above. Arist. Ausc. mirab. 82; Diod. v
3; Athen. xv 684c; Ovid met. v 394; against, Pamphos in Paus. ix 31, 9. Violets and
pothos connected with funerals: Halliday’s note to h. Horn. Cer. 8 (p. 130).

Note also link of ios with Ion, to whom it was given by Ioniad nymphs: Nikandr.
On Farming , Athen. xv 68x, also 6833b. Iamides: Strab. 356; Paus. vi 22, 7.

6. Stephanos: 2x5, 3o(Idelar); AG 136,10. For separation: Plato, Phaid. 64cKrates
B (3) iii 52 with refs. n. 3.

Difficulties: T (1) 56 notes that conversion of copper and other metals into black
sulphides accounts for blackening; smelting to a yellow metal for yellowing.
Whitening is harder to explain. If black product was dried before smelting, it might
be whitened as effect of efflorescence of salts derived from the Divine Water. Or some
white material (compounds of mercury, arsenic, or antimony) may have been added.

7. Anon: AG 219, 135 f, cf. 199, 1. Zos: 215, 8. Ibn Umail: Stapleton (5) 74 f.
Pibechios on whitening etc.: AG 220, 8.

8. AG 55, 13-18; BC i 201, 210 f.

9. XXVIII 29 (112-18); also x (137); goes on to bramble-toad.

10. AG x 12. Geponika ; cf. Gep. xix 9 etc.
ix. F (1) i 234 f and DL i 10 (Egypt).

12. AG 47, 2.

13. F (1) i 236. Also 48, 4; 48, 16; 49, 2. Elydrion: P. Holm, xi 16; Leyd. x 68:
AG 48, 1. Paul. Aig., medical writer 7th c., iii 2.

14. Ibid; AG 51, 6.

15. AG 51, xi. Not crackle, tri^ein — i.e. hardens; tin leaf crackles as it chills, cf.

161, 8. Geber mentions the Greeks raised the question of getting rid of tin’s noises:
B (1) 230.

16. AG 150, 4; F (1) i 237.

17. Papyrus: Nock (2); PMG iv 1716-44 (Teubner 126); R (2) 19 ff and 80 ff;
Wessely, Denks. d.k. Ak.d. Wiss. PH Ki. xxxvi 2, 1888.

Gem: Mouterde (1) and (2); cf. Derchain (2) no 322 for the riding..

18. Syrigmos: R (2) 82; Pap. Leyd. W vii 27. In general: Dieterich (2) 190; O.
Weinreich (2) 345; Hopfner (1) i par. 780 (p. 201). See Pythag. of Rhodes in Euseb.
pr. ev. v 8, 1 f (Hopfner 203).

19. De Ridder: Cat. Coll, de Clerq vii 2, 3474 (p. 781). A word like aspasmos
understood.

20. Mouterde (1) 58; De Ridder vii 2, 3474. On right Aphrodite holds mirror;
rings marked on ankles.

Other refs, for Eros and Psyche kissing, Mouterde 58 n. 4, with unintelligible
formulas, e.g. intaglios showing link of Mithraic cult with magic: Delatte, Mus.
beige xviii 1914 5-20; R (13) 52 n. 2; Fabretti, Synt. Inter. 531, 14. Abraxas (Coll.
Fabretti), scene with no legend: Montfaucon ii, 2nd pt., pi. ccxii (1). On right here
a winged god like one of the pantheoi : Hopfner (1) i fig. 21 f (pp. 214 f); Budge (5)
132 f.

21. Aphrodite also found on magic Syrian stones standing naked and doing
hair: de Ridder, vii 2, 3473, 780, Anoriphrasis. Also on back of lion with drapery
rolled round right leg, hands lifted to falling tresses, ib. vii 1, 1169 (p. 192): Saba-
thianadia lad Sabaoth Aidn.

22. Mouterde (1) 59; Nock (2) 154 n. 3; Cook ii 2, 1047 fig. 902; Kekule Terra-
kotten v. Shy lien xlvi; Laborde Vases Yambert i 47; S. Reinach Rep. Vases ii 191;
R (13) 52. Burnings: Derchain (2) nos 323-4; tree, 324; pillar, 328; butterfly, 325 f.
For embrace of lovers, no 329, “Reciprocal Love of my Soul.” From Tarsos.

23. Delatte (10) 82-6 for gem with inscr. Nicharoplex, assoc, with solar god;
Love alone or Love with Psyche. Cf. a second pap. Nock (2) 157 f. Chald. oracles:
Lewy (2) 95, 126-9, 12 2 i Psell. comm. 1141c (K. 47); BC i 159.

NOTES

407

24. Syn., AG 59, 6; Sophe, 211, 13. Stapleton (4) 35 says of Arabs, “Jamasp
informs Ardashir that, owing to their possession of the Secret, ‘the Sages are pre¬
served from poverty and hunger.’ ” See also 34.

Hopkins (3) 42, 49; Read 13 f. For Egyptian lapidum tic tores : Eiber Hermetis 8 3, 24;
Cumont (1) 96 n. 3; Lippmann (1) i 277 f; Hopkins (6).

25. Diels (2) 131.

26. Forbes (1) i 138; Euseb. chron. Olymp. 188; Iren, i 13, 1; Epiph. adv. haer. i
3; baer. 14 (i 132, Colon 1682). Plin. xix 4; xxv 95; xxviii 49; xxxii 52; xxxv 50.

27. Pfister (1); Reinking. Koptic MS, Berlin 8316. Tinting: MS 2327 f223 ;
Stephanos, ib. £64; Ps. Demok. ib. 118—cf. 15. See also Cayley, J. Chem. Educ. iii
1936 1149 and 1937 4979; J- M. Stillman 80

28. MS 2317 f2i; B (1) i6if. Pap. Leyd. x (101 recipes) & P. Holm. (152) were found
in the same tomb with 2 magic pap. (xii-xiii of Preis.); xiii and the two first are in the
same firm hand; not rolls, but books. Date mid-3rd c. (Reuvens, Leemans); c. 300
(Lagercrantz); first quarter 4th. c. (Preis.). P. Holm, twice mentions Afrikanos
(Sextus Afr. a.d. 2c). also Demok. & Anaxilaos; has 9 recipes on metals, 72 on
precious stones & pearls, 70 on stuffs.

29. F (1) i 220 f; P. Holm, iota-zeta 28; P. Leyd. i 10, 9. Isis to Id.: F (1) 259.
Lagercrantz, P. Holm. p. 143. Terms: Lippmann (1) i 11, 325 f; ii 69 sv Decknamen.
P. Leyd. v — PGM xii 401 ff.

30. AG x 12; Plin. xxviii 29 (118).

31. Sat. 88. For D.’s theory of Nile floods, Diod. i 39; JL (5) 35. Barbaroi: BC i
240-2.

32. K. Reinhardt 479 f; Delatte (7) 25 ff (spectral emanations). Windischmann,
Zoroast. Stud. 1863 288 thinks eidola are the Fravashi materialistiscb Aufgefesst;
but this is not likely. Herakleides seems to have criticised D.’s theory: DL v 87 “Of
Nature. Of Eidola. Against Demokritos.” Zeller, Ph. Gr. iii (4th ed.) 1038 nn 3-4. In
Placita of Aetius, D. is joined with Herakleides and Empedokles: iv 9, 6 (Diels 397).

33. Demetr. xlviii; rhet.gr. (Spengel 1856) iii 278; Stamford (1) 58; Wellesc 147 f.
Papyri: Leemans PG ii 1885 56 n. 1 (p. 17 lines 28-31; p. 14 lines 31-6); Wellesc 146.
In general: F. Cabriol, Diet. Ant. Chret. et Liturgie 1907 i 1268-88; iii 264!; Dornseff
33 ff.

34. Ruelle (2) & (3); Poiree; A. Gastoue, Bull, musicol. i 1907 24-31; H. Leclerq
DACL i 1268 ff (Gnostics); (B (2) ii 219, 434; G. Reese, Music in Middle Ages 1940
85 f; K. Wachsmann, Unt. vorgreg. Gesang 1935 24-34.

35. C. Jan. Mus. Sc. Gr. 176 f; also D’Ooge, Nicomachos, Intro, to Arithmetic i 6,
189 f. Eudoxos: Santillana; Wassenstein 90.

36. Jan 241; Ruelle (1) Iren. adv. haer. i 14 (PG vii 610). Lewy (2) 397 on Mesode-
mes and Silence as first arche of Pythags.

37. Excerpta MSG 277, 6.

38. Sige: PGM ii 193, 34; Wellesc 145. Dornseff, Stoicheia vii 1922 33. Archytas
took music of spheres not accessible to our senses: Diels vors, i 23, 330 Cornford on
Tim. 72; D’Ooge 98, Examination of melodic structures of exs. from P. Leyd.
and P. Berl. show one set meant for amulets, one for invocations: Wellesc 140 f.
The melesmata are not based in any Jewish, Syriac or Greek musical system; so
Ruelles’ idea does not work. Papyrus: Oxy. 2728.

39. Rev. i 8; Stamford (1) 82 and (2) 43 f. Add 7 Pleiads and Hebrew Tetra-
grammata for God, 7 archangels: RE sv Hebdomas (2); Cabriol i 56-8; Barb 111;
Dornseff 11 ff, ^5 ff, 82 ff; London P. 46 (Kenyon 66, 24) cited Dornseff 47 f.

Numerical calculations also; Holy Ghost as Dove, Peristera, at Christ’s Baptism
= 801 = Alpha Omega. So “I am the A & O” = “I am the Trinity”: Contenau (1)
Gems: Bonner (1) 186 f; Matter iii pi. 2A, 6.

40. Standford 82. See him also on the law of “increasing numbers” and rhopalic
lines. Mute prayers: BC i 47.

41. Stamford 82 and 11-3.

4°8 NOTES

42. Stoics etc.: Grube, The Greek and R. Critics 1965; P. de Lacy, AJP Ixix 1948
241 & 71 lx 1939 85-92.

43. Dionysios, i 66, x6 & xii 134, 9, cf. xi 124, 25; Long, sublime xxxix; Stamford

17. Note also the writing of sigma-less poems.

VII: OSTANES

1. DL ix 34; BC i 168 nn 1-2. Against narrow Hellenism: DL i 9; BC i 165 f;
Empedokles and Persians, BC i 238-40; Hekataios and Demok. on Jews, 240-2;
Aristoxenos and mages, 242—4. Diaphora : Lagercrantz (2) 113 ff.

2. Plin. xxx 8 etc.; BC i 168 ff. Heptathongos: Porphyr. de phil. ex or. haur. i
(138 Wolf): Euseb. pr. ev. v 14; BC ii 284 (u),alsoi 175-7. Various O.’s: BCii 268
n. 3a: DL Pr. 2; Souda sv; BC i 172 n. 5; Kopp i (1869) 407 ff; Lippmann (1) 66;
Priesendanz(2); Wellmann (1) 15 n. 1; B. ii 318 6, & n. 9, also 14m 26; Plin. xxx 11.

3. Plin. xxviii 70 (261); Wellmann (1) 78. Cf. recipes, ib. 19 (69) on not exposing
self when urinating to sun or moon, or letting drops fall on anyone’s shadow; O. says
let one’s morning piss fall on foot as protection against magic potions: cf. Amm.
Marc, xxiii 6, 79; DL viii 1, 17 (Pythags.); Joseph. BJ ii 8, 9 (148), Essenenes—
queried Wellmann (Abb. Pruss. Ak. 1928 fasc. 7, p. f. 7) but correct; H. Brunnhofer,
Ar. Ur^eit 19x0 324 ff, cf. Hdt. i 133; Plin. xxx 17; Cumont TMM i 105 n. 4; BC i
297 f. How to disgust women with love: Plin. xxviii 77 (2560 cf. xxx 24 (82) and
xxxii 18 (49). See also xxxii 38 (115 f). For Plin. and sources: BC i 171-3.

4. Plin. xx 2 (8 ff).

5. Plin. xxxviii 2 (4 ff); goes on to other writers with barbarian recipes. Diels vors.
(68) 55B 300, 13a, attributes to Bolos. Xenokrates, a physician, wrote a treatise with
such recipes (human bodies for materials), see Galen, simples x i (xii 248 K.). O. and
Oktateuchos, BC i 173; O. as descendant of Zoroaster, 175 f.

6. BC. i 188 f.

7. BC ii 293 (16): orat. ad Gr. xvi (18, 3 Schwartz)-. BC i 189 n. 1; ii 295 n. 2.
Note recipe of O. linking coral with peony and root of solanum. Similarities of
works attrib. to O. and Z., BC i 114 ff.

8. BC i 189; Wellmann RE Diosk. 1138, 63; 1139, 20; Hermes xxxiii 360 ff; BC i
xx6.

9. BC i 190 with refs.

10. BC i 191. latrika of Aetios of Amida (6th c. a.d.) ii: some MSS give extracts
from a book on Stones by Diogenes (? Demosthenes), which Wellmann thought
might be a corruption for Ostanes, then for Demokritos. Aet. ii 30 & 32; Rose 482;
BCii 303 & 482; Wellmann (10) 68 (55) B300,12 (11 216 n.) & (3) 90.; V. Rose48411!
Change of mind; Wellmann (8) 131.

11. Wellmann (8) 139 ff, and RE Evax. Orphic: Hopfner RE Lithika 765, 42 &
(1) i par. 554; ed. Mely 137 ff. Wirbelauer 42 ff. Aetios: V. Rose; Wellmann l.c.
Synoichites-. Plin. xxxvii (192); Wellmann RE Evax.

12. BC ii 304, 6 ff. Damigeron, original, may have drawn on lapidaries of Chal¬
deans, Soudines and Zachalias. For Psellos & Meliteniotes (Byz. poet, I3th-i4th c.)
and connection with Damigeron: BC i 129 & 193; Wellmann (8) 88, 104, 107;
Wirbelauer.

13. Arnob. adv. gent. {43 (4th c.).

14. BC i 5—7. Xanthos prob. took name Zarathustra via west Iranian form
*Zarahustra', the second half suggested aster (star), so provided fanciful etymologies.
Ps.-Clem. breaks as Zo(sa) rho(e) asteros: BC i 44. Paus. v 27, 5 & vii 6, 6; Tac. am.
iii 62.

15. Dionys., schol. Hdt. iii 61; Schwartz RE Dionysios no 112, col. 934. Pedion:
Strab. xiii 4, 13; village, RE iv 2212. Anaitis: RE Anaitis 2030, 33; Buresch, A us
Eydien 66 ff; Kiel & v. Premerstein, Zweite Reise in Eydien 89 no. 178; 100 no. 197.

NOTES 409

16. Picard Eph'ese et Claros 1922 130 ff, 164 ff. Pergamon: Birt, Ph. Woch. 1932
159-66; perhaps cults here and at Ephesos went back to Achaimenids and were
developed by Stoicising Attalids. Relief: Cumont (12) 4th ed. 135, fig. 10; 275 n. 29.

17. G. Thomson (1) 134 f, also ch. xiii. Wheelwright fr. 72.

18. Cherniss (1) 331; further (1) and (2). Wheelwright 121-5.

19. Wheelwright fr. 30-2 & 35, with pp. 43 f: W. Kirk 356 (both on fire in
general and on celestial fire); dox. 275, 2. For H. and mages: L. Stella. Oracle:
Lewy (2) 13 2.

20. Refs, etc., BC i ch. 1. For Er: Bignone (1); Bidez (7) 273 ff & (8) 257 ff.
Aristotle: Bignone ii 84, 342 & BC i 16; also F (1) ii ch. viii.

Image of World as Temple: Aristotle, F (1) ii 233-8; Kleanthes, Bywater 79;
Bernays, Die Dialoge 166 f; Manilius i 20-4. See also here ch. xii n. 29; xix n. 1.

This leads into the idea of the World as a City, ult. from Zenon with his teaching
that there was no need to build temples as the Cosmos in its wholeness is the
substance of God. Chrysippos compares to a City; Poseidonios takes up: DL vii
138; Stob. SVF ii 527. Alexandras (bro. of Kassandros gov. of Makedonia 316-298)
was given land on peninsula of Athos and founded (after 316) city of Ouranopolis
(on site of Sane) ; inhabitants, Ouranides, with Zeus Ouranidon and image of Aphro¬
dite Ourania. Cf. Cic. nat. deor. ii 31, 78; 62, 154 (SVF ii 1127 & 1131); Areios Did.,
SVF ii 528. Also Cic. de fin. iii 19, 64 (SVF iii 333); de leg. i 7,22f (SVF iii 334); de rep.
i 19 (SVF iii 338). Adam as Kosmopolis, Philon de op. m. 142-4 (i 50, 2 C.); cf. Op.
19, 143; Jos. 29; Mos. ii 51 (12). Cosmos as Magalopolis: de spec. leg. i 33-6 (SVF ii
1010, 3 etc. Dion. Chrys. Or. xxxvi 22 f; Sen. ad Marciam 18, 1.

21. Bidez (5) 256 ff & (6) 81 & 83; Cumont (9) 69; Wetter 101 ff. No Greek
versions of the sacred lit. of Mazdeans till Alexander: BC i 57.

22. Proklos in remp. ii 122 ff & 114 ff (Kroll); Hirzel i 334 & 309 n. 3. Axioch.
371a; Cumont; Ganschinetz (4) 2415 ff. Tale of mage Gobryes sent to save Delos
from pillage as the natal isle of Apollo. There is still a strong tendency of classical
scholars to make Greek culture “autonomous,” see Merlan (2) on Noumenios and
on daimons, 34-6; contrast Dodds (3).

23. Zeller, Ph. d. Gr. iii 10 A; t. 1038; RE viii 476, 16; BC i 15.

24. Augustine, civ. dei xxii 28; Menippos vi and at the start.

25. BCi 34-6. New names: Zaratos, Zaratas, Zarades. This Babylonian character
grew so different from the Persian Z. that some writers postulated two prophets;
there were expansions, links, fusions, localisations. Priests at Hierapolis (Mabbug)
annexed Z. and set in forests around there the place where he had been in retreat;
a demon was shut in well by Z. getting the goddess Simi pour seawater in, etc.

26. Strab. xv 3, 15.

27. Paus. v 27, 5.

28. Ep. 258; Cumont MMM i 10 n. 3. Much variety in scattered groups: Plout.
de is. 45-7; de latenter viv. 6 (1130a).

29. Schaeder Urform. 140H;BCi 69.TriadinChaldean oracles: Lewy (2) I47;4i7ff.

30. BC i 69-71; dualism (fire and water), R (10) 70 & 75, cf. Hippolyt. ref. i 2,
12-5; R. 74 n. 5; Diels vors 38 (62) A 3 & 5; 60 (47) A8; Lagercrantz (3) 401 &
411 f; Stapleton (7) 134. Oxy. contract, P. Oxy. 2722; “Beloved,” Roscher v 888.

31. BC ii 205; later compilation 323; 351, 9. Ostanes seems to know processes
that his follower Maria the Jewess perfectioned so as to give gems phosphorescence;
the Demok. provenance here is not sure. Ruska in Lippmann (1) ii 87; B ii 424,13 &
i 205.

32. BC ii 3x3 f & 58, 12; “metals coloured by means of watery simple varnish or
quite superficial alloying,” B (2) iii 61 n. 3 and i 59 ff. Leukipp., B. intro. 201 f;
AG 53, 18 (badly edited) & 55, 22. Also Reiss (4) 1344, 36 ff.

33. BCii 315 n. 6; AG 61, 5-9. “And that you may wonder at the man’s wisdom,
look how he had two catalogues drawn up.” Also Lagercrantz, Holm. p. 109.
Tannery, Mem. Sclent, ix 147 ff; Ruska (8).

4io

NOTES

34. B (3) iii 105. Ruska (2) 51 ff shows it from Greek, like Book of Krates. See also
Blochet 106.

35. Synesios: BC ii 316 A5 n. 3; AG 59, 4; 61, 17; 67, 23; 122, 65; 58, 19.

36. B (3) ii 326; BC ii 315.

37. AG 39; 122; 67. Kedren. 213 (Bonn) cf. Firm. Mat. Math, vii i, 2. Porphyr.
in remp. ii 105, 23-5; 107, 5-7 & 14-23; he insists that men must think in images.

38. BC ii 334 ff; AG 261 ff. Note fire is athikton, not to be touched, virgin:
? Iranian. BC ii 336 n. 6.

39. Olympos: MMM ii 36 n. 1.

40. Refs. BC i 208 f. He appears in a lexikon and 2 lists of goldmakers, and is
called King of Armenia in title of a treatise: B (2) i 69; CMAG i 41.

41. B (3) ii 239 n. 1 & 259; Lippmann (1) 68; Cumont(n) 272 f; AG 35, io;BCii
315 A3a. Success: Kopp (1869) 433, 353 n. 30; Hoefer i 274.

42. BC ii 345-7; B (3) iii 13 ff & Intro 216 ff; Blochet 101-3. The ref. to Andalusia
shows late additions; the author cites the Almagest of Ptol.

43. Krates: B (3) iii 72 f.

44. Plin. xxxvi 21 (149-51); BC ii 201; B. intro. 234. Found in street: cf. Theo-
phrastos: Browne (1) 23 f. Avicenna, “It is found in the dirt of streets and is trodden
underfoot by men.” Ibn Umail: Stapleton (5) 75.

45. Balti, Belati (Lat. Baltis) Our Lady in Syriac, identified with planet Venus,
RE sv ii 2842; BC ii 116 f.

46. B (3) 119-23; BC ii 347-52; Blochet 103 n. 6. For HT: R (n) 35. Ishtar:
Kroll (1) 206 ff.

47. BC i 40; Gottheil 35; Theodore bar Konai Livre des Scholies, BC 11 103 f, who
says Zor. was Jewish but set out teachings in 7 languages: Greek, Hebrew, Hyrkan-
ian, of Merv, Zarnaq (Zrang, cap. of Seistan), Persian, of Sagastan: BC ii 132 f.

48. Manget i 513b; BC ii 328, Interrog. regis Calid et resp. Morieni. Arsicanus seems
Ostanes. Ruska (4) i 44.

49. Agathodaimon: Ganschinietz (4) 2395, 61. For Hermes: Zos. in AG 109 &
115 ff; Ruska (4) i 17 ff. Urine: B (3) 138 n. 89. Blochet 165 f: The strange beast is the
creation of the alchemists who have put all their wisdom in it: 4 faces each with 40
tongues, and one of them said that in heaven’s sphere are 360 degrees, in a year
360 days, so each degree corresponds to a day.

50. Stapleton (2) 68-73; ( 4 ) 34 -

51. AG 341 f; B (3) ii 320 f; R (10) 35.

52. Jastrow, DieRelig. Babyl. i 351; Dhorme, Relig.assyro-bab. 1910272!!; Porphyr.
de abs. ii 27. CRAI 1931 22 ff; Carcopino RHR cvi 1932 592 ff; Eissfeldt, Molk als
Opferbegriff 1935 (Beit. z.Rel. d.Alt., 3 Plalle); Guey, Mel. Ec. RomeWn 1937 88 ff.

53. B (3) ii 309; BC ii 336-41.

54. Preisigke NB: Pbekios, Pbekis, Pibechis, Pibiches. The name P. here shows
the source of the text was Greek. Paris Mag. P.: R (11) 33 n. 2 & 36. Jealousy, cf.
BCii 337 & 309, withn. 3. Philosopher as doctor of occult sciences: Cumont (1) 122.
Psellos (nth c.j calls Pib. a pupil of Ostanes: BC ii 308 f with notes. Ps. says he
“covered with shadow” the mysteries, that is, veiled them.

55. R (1) 363 & 104, 10; BC ii 270 fr. 6 where O. is called the Roumi. D. to L.:
AG 53; Diels vors. 68 (55) B300, 18. Kings: Reiss (4) 1344, 3 1 ff > who compares Zos
(AG 239 f). Diels notes traces of Ionian forms in his letter. Crown, a particular work,
not a coll, as R (1) 363 takes; cf. work of Geber, B (3) ii p. xxxviii n. 3.

56. H. G. G. Herklots, How the Bible came to us, 1959, 109. Letter of Aristeas, 1917,
(H. St. J. Thackeray) prob. 150-100 b.c.

57. Cumont (10); Par. 2419 f46v; AG 26, cf. B (3) ii 319.

58. Porph. phil. ex or. hour, i (138 Wolff: Euseb. pr. ev. v 14); BC ii 284-6 (11) for
rel. to Heptathongos etc. Also Nichomachos: BC ii 283 (10). For Christian rels. of
O. to angels, BC ii 289 ff.

59. Koir. 3,6 Ruelle (Mely ii); BC ii 315^8; Cumont (1) I 54 «- 31 HTRxxvi 152 ff.

NOTES

411

60. Zos. AG 129; Stapleton (4) 35.

61. Hermippos wrote On the Mages'. F (1) 43. Zoroaster had work On Nature, a
lapidary, books of astrology, also alchemy: BC i 131-52.

62. AG 229, 16 ff; BC ii 243; F (1) i 266 f & (14) 125 f.

VIII: HERMES TRISMEGISTOS

1. CMAG vi 1928 44; BC ii 309 f. Text goes on, “For one sees at once that the
names he gives to the art’s practises are mostly unknown, e.g. samari, phaktiton,
plakoton.” Phaktiton seems Latin, factitius.

Steph. cites Kleidion of Hermes: Ideler iii 212, cf De Falco riv. difilol. 1936 379 ’
AG 281, 15 ff & 19; Ruska (2) 17 & 56, 29; Kroll viii 799, 33 & 795, 5 ff; Dieterich
(2) 71. Firmicus: Math, iii 1, 1 (Kroll i 91, eg 196, 22), mentions an Hanubius,
depositary of Hermes’ secrets, cf. CCAG ii 15 9 & 202 ff; RE sv Annubion (Anubion)
& suppl. i sv. But this is possibly only an astrologer.

2. F (5) 48. Wisdom vii 17-21. In a Gnostic sort of way. Wisdom is made the first
creature of Yahweh, before the cosmos; Wisdom is seen as man’s quest. Philon
supplanted Sophia with Logos.

' 3. Klaros, K. Bursch 1889; Porphyr. phil ex or. hour. (G. Wolff 1856). Forgeries:
Orac. Chald., Kroll (3); Dodds (2).

4. KK (CH xxiii) 3 f.

5. Dreams: Boyance (3). Magic: Hopfner (1) ii par. 162 ff. Theurgy: Iambi, de
myst. iii 2 f. Exs .: Poimandres; Oxy. 1381 (Imothes appears); Preis. SB 4127 = Nock
HTR xxx 61 ff. Christians: Pastor of Hermas; Passio Perpetuae iv 2 ff, vii 2 ff, x i,
xi-xiv. Gnostic: Iren, i 14, i (M.) = i 127 ff Harv. (Tetrad appears to Markos);
Hippol. vi 43 (Logos to Valent.); ix 3 (vision of Elchasai); Evang. Petri v 40 etc.

6. KK 5 (Scott i 386, 20). CF. what said above of stelai, e.g. that of Hephaistiaion
of Memphis; Isis’ Aretologies (Peck 193); CCAG viii 4 (p. 102) etc.

7. Phileb. 18b; Phaidr. 274c-e, 275c. He also calls the god Ammon.

8. Diod. i 16.

9. Souida, sv Phaunos; Tert. adv. valent, xva; Iamb, de myst. viii 1-2; Galen adv. ea
quae in Jul. In general, B (1) 133. Olymp. “The ancients had the habit of hiding the
truth, of veiling and obscuring by allegories what is clear and evident for all the
world,” B (1) 193. Originally Greeks had 3 Seasons; later Autumn was added.

10. Boylan 60; Breasted (1) 17.

11. Boylan 60 n. 4; Naville Horus Myth ; sunboat, Boylan 5 8—6 x. Staff, ib. ch. 13;
Magic, 124-35.

12. KK vii & lxvi.

13. We know a priest there of the name: Sethe (1) 8 f; Brugsch thes. v 866 f;
Mallet Nasr-el-Agou Temple: Otto: 135 f.

14. Clem, strom. i 21,134 (p. 399); Sethe (1) 6 ff; Griffith (1) 4; Brugsch WB 1221,
JEA April 1923 127. R (1) 118 f refuses accept identity of Theban Hermes and
Teos-p-hb of texts.

15. R (1) 120 f; Boylan 167 f. Advents: CCAG viii (4) 181, 20; 257 n. 1.

16. G. R. Hughes (1) and (2); also for Oserapis and Anubis. Request for birth of
child, with conditional vow to Amenophis son of Hapu, on wooden tablet, Malinine,
cf. Gardiner (2) i pi. 50, 2i In general Gardiner (1) & (2) i pi. 80; Simpson.

17. Hughes (1) 179; Edwards i, xxii; Thompson JEA 1941 77; Volten 107; P.
Berl. 8345, 2. 1 & 4. 15, also 4. 10; Thompson PSBAxxxiv 1912 227-33. Sentence:
P. Insinger 8, 19; Volten (2) 78 f.

18. Hughes 179; JNES xvii 9 n. j; P. Or. Inst. 19422/3.

19. A. Klasens, Magical Statue Base (Socle Behague ) in Mus. of Ant. Leiden, 195 2 -

20. Skeat 208 for refs.

21. Only previous proof for oracles of Thoth-Hermes was P. Paris 1, with astron.
pap. Skeat 205 & 208.

412

NOTES

22. Diod. xxxi, frags. 15a; 17c. Skeat 207 for discussion of 2nd fr. and P. Tebt. 5,
I53n, and of exclusion of Panop. from amnesty 118 b.c.

23. Erman (7) 25; Neugebauer (2) i 85.

24. Kazarow RE xv 222; Roeder (1) 171.

25. Kruse RE Va 1076; Eitrem viii 698 & 706 ff; Trismegas in PGM vii 551
(Gordian 2 3 8-44). For older view: Weber Archiv f. Relig. 1934 xxi 17 3. A theosophic
work (Delatte, Anec. Ath. 1927 331, 10-32) names a Hodon the Trismegistos whose
doctrine is Christian. He seems a Byz. imitator. Form: Great God HT in Or. Gr.
Irncr. 716, 1, shows T had become a proper name. For play on 1 and 3: Martial v
24, cf. CH xvi 3.

26. Synk. 72; Loeb Manethos 209; F (2) iii p. clxiii; Scott iii 492 f; R (1) 139;
Hopfner fontes 74. Seriadic: Joseph. JA i 71; R (1) 183; JL (5) ch. iv.

27. Seshat: Erman (2) 396 f & (1) 36 f; Lepsius denk. iii 169; Laqueur. Celsus:
Wellmann (5); MS has emmanetos.

28. Asclep. xxxvii.

29. Strom, liv 6, 4; no proof that Books of Thoth were in temples under Pharaohs:
F (1) i 76, despite e.g. Book of Dead ch. 64.

30. Ghalioungui 32.

31. Horap. i 38 (Sbord. (1) 85), also Roeder RE viii 2316. Magic prestigiae, Lauth;
also F (1) i 124. Paul: 2 Tim. 3, 8 & Exod. 7, 8. Plin. xxx 3 ff (Mayhoff iv 420 ff);
BC ii 14 n. 23. Noumenos (Euseb.Jir. ev. ix 8; Leemans fr. 18); Origen C. Cels, iv

51. Talmud: Ganschinietz RE James-, Schurer Gesch. Jud. Volks iii (3rd ed.) 292;
Cumont RHR cxiv 1936 19 ff; Apuleius apol. xl (Helm xoo, 9); Plin.: Messina (2) 25.

32. Lexa ii 129-34 & i 158; demotic spellbook of Lond. & Leyd. 6, 1 to 8, 11,
cf. ib. 17, 1-21; Lexa ii 124 f. Also 16, 1-14 (Lexa ii 122 f): after many names, “Tat
Tat bring Boel (thrice). Tagrtat eternal, bring Boel (thrice) ..

33. P. Anastasi no. 374 3R 23-8, 32-8; Lexa ii 157.

34. Kopt formula from Greek spellbook of Paris, 2 R 33, 3L to 7: Lexa ii 15 5 f.
Texts: Erman, Z.f. dg. Spr. xxi 1883; Wessely Gr. Zauberpap. Paris u. Lond. 1888
(Denks. d. k. Ak. d. Wiss., Vienna xxxvi); F. L. Griffith Z.f. dg. Spr. xxxix 1901.

33. Lexa i 160; Mag. pap. Leyd. i 384 N 1-5. In the formula we find “Mommon
Thoth Nanoumbre” i.e. Egyptian “Nanou p Re = Good is Re.”

36. Mag. pap. Lond. 46, 240-9^ Lexa i 162 f. Lexa stresses Egyptian character,
even the incorrect use of 3rd personal singular of the personal pronoun in place of
the 2nd.

37. Harris mag. pap. 7, 1-4; Lexa ii 39 (2 oth dyn.). Action: “Say 4 times and set
the Divine Eye, in which is made the image of Enhuret, in the man’s hand.”

38. Scott i 97; Chwolsohn i 638; in gen. Chwolsohn & Segal, with Bousset (3).

39. Scott i 108. Ahaydimon: Lemay; Chwolsohn ii 13; Massignon 368; Fuck 14
n. 18; Stapledon (5) 70.

40. Kahane 119 f; for Krater, 18 f. Krater appears in art scenes of prophecy, e.g.
with Lykophron and Kassandra on Berthouville silver cup: Webster, Hellenistic Art
1966 36. Krater of Alexander seems first brought in by Ploutarch, prob. going back
to great krater of Dareios used on state occasions (captured by Alex, at Sousa); the
mixing-bowl scene should prob. be set at Sousa (when policy of mingling Macedon¬
ians and Persians was inaugurated), not at Opis where sharing was limited to
Macedonians: E. Badian, Historia 1958 vii 425-44.

41. Hermes: CH i 48 (frag, iv, 4); Scott ii 140; Angus 343. Also Frags, xiii 3,
11b, 13a, 14. Thoth: F (1) i 68 & 86 f; R (8) 73-83; Bousset (4) 38 ff. But see Otto
(1) i 15 n. 3; Boylan 112 ff & 122 f. Inscrs.; Brugsch (1) 49 & 37; R (8) 73 & (1)
59-68.

42. 35 Chapters Zos. to Euseb., AG 169. 5; F (1) 1 244 (11); and AG 150, 12; F (1)
i 243 (8). Sublimated: aithale.

43. AG 408, 4. AG 282, 14. AG 89 9 f, Olymp. citing Zos. See also Isis to Hor.
F(i)i 253 & 259. Cf. Olymp. 84,12, “Chemes, who had been disciple of Parmenides,

NOTES 4 T 3

declares: One is All, though which the All is; for if the All does not have the [One],
Nothing is the All”: F (1) i 252 f.

44. AG 100, 100, 18 to 101, 10; F (1) i 126 f.

45. Math, iii praef. 2-4; Astr. Gr. 185 ff.

46. Cf. Math, iv 22, 2; iii 1, 1 f. He says (iv praef. 5) that he has transcribed “all
that Hermes and Anubis (Hanubis) have revealed to Asclepius, all that Petosiris
and Nechepso have set out in detail, all that Abraham, Orpheus, and Kritodemus
as well as other men learned in astronomy have produced.” R (1) 125 f prefers
Chnubis-, Serruys, rev. philol. xxxii 1908 147 f et Hermambis. In gen. F (1) i ch.v.

47. AG 125, xo; F (1) i 248 f (23) connection with Nile: AG 263, 3 ff; BC ii 330
and 333 n. 11; AG 120, 19, stone with pneuma. Living: Anon, AG 132, 16. Silver
as moon, CMAG vii 1 and passim. ThedretikStatos Hermes: B (3) i 261.

48. AG 115, 10; Olymp. 93, 14.

49. AG 20, 13 (Egg: Mark f 106): F (1) i 253 [32].

50. AG 132, 19. Text not sure: F (1) i 74.

51. AG 424, 8; F (1) i 74. Text bad.

52. AG 156, 4; F (1) 243 f; Ruska (2) 11 f. Cf. AG 162, 3 on softening-whitening;
128, 15, lye-washing for 6 months, cf. Olymp. 69, 16 and 72, 1. Also 132, 16 and
422, 15 . Term “flower” can refer to actual yellow flower used for colouring metal
or to efflorescence (flower of copper or of salt. Saffron at times seem to represent
a metal. Acacia-gum is Arabian. Olymp. 99, 12 says H. often advised, “boil it in a
stuff of thick linen.”

To Pan, the All, at times means various preparations: 192, 21, it is symbolic
name of metallic body of magnesia, Lippmann (1) i 78. For magnesia F (1) i 145-7.
Beginning and end: ano kai kato, above and below, may be part of the formula:
Lippmann (1) i index ano-kato.

53. AG 281, 14. Also the form Pauseras.

34. F (j) i 251 f: items 2, 3, 5, 9, 13, 15, 29 f, 17, 22 f, 28. Olymp. says both H.
and Agathodaimon call lye-washing the Great Treatment, AG 72, 20.

55. AG 175, 12.

56. F (1) i 253 f: cited by Synk.

57. I Cor. 11, 10; Gen. vi, 2.

58. F (1) i 209 f. Koiranides must go back at least to ist c: inspired Marcellus of
Side in poem on Fish under Hadrian.

59. Ib. 211 f. Harpokration’s book was graved on a stele of tempered iron;
Euphrates. Hermes in Syriac on a stele of iron.

60. Kyran. 20, 10-4; F (1) i 212; koukouphas, Egyptian word, cf. Horap. i 55;
PGM ii 18 and vii 411 (diminutive); kakouphas iii 424. Poupos seems deformation of
Latin upupa (French huppe). Koiranides =content of Kyranides II-IV.

61. AG 207,1-4; Zos. 107 ff. esp. iii, 19; B. intro 127 on Paris MS 7147 f 80 etc.

62. Olymp. 101, II; F (1) i 212-14, cf. Koiran. 54, 1 and 286

63. CCAG viii 2 (167, 3); Delatte, Herbarius index pivoine. Cf. Kyr. 6, 1. Sacred
Book: Kyr. 7, 22.

64. Kyr. 21, 25.

65. AG 213 f; F (1) i 254 f. Komaris: Lippmann (1) i 22. Heron = Horos: Per-
drizet (3) 8-11; Cumont (13) i 1 ff, esp. 6 f. R (1) 144 n. 3 suggests Heron = Agatho¬
daimon, which is unlikely. A TC of a falcon-headed Horos has on back Heron:
Perdrizet (4) no no, p. 36 and (3) 9.

PG, v 247 ff (sun-prayer): “I am Thoyth, finder and founder of pharmaka and
letters ... I am Heron of high repute, egg of the ibis, egg of the falcon, egg of the
ever-roaming Phoinix.”

Another extract of Book of Sophe (AG 211) has as subtitle (f. 251 f): “Mystic
Book of Zosimos the Theban.” F (1) i 26 n. 1 thinks it might be by Zos. of Panop;
it repeats the phrase about conquering poverty. But the author might well be citing
Zos. *

NOTES

Sun and Eyes: Sext. Emp. adv. astr. v 31; Porphyr. hag. xlv, cf. CCAG v 4, 217,
12 ffand vii 233, 8; Blum 97; Cumont rM>/. solaire 23 [469!, on sun-king, 7 [453] n. 1.

66. AG 23, 8-17; 115, 10; 267, 16 to 268, 2. Demok.: MS 2327 f293-

67. B (1) 135 f and 356; Cardan etc. Misc. Berol. i 19; Fabric, xii (1724) 696; Syb.
Books i 141. B (1) 134 says Hymn of Hermes from Poim. was recited by alchemists.

Bythos: Crutwell 211. Sophia, last of aiones, longed to know the Bythos; pined
and wandered to melt into infinitude; met Horos (Limit) who assuaged her madness;
she bore prematurely Enthymesis (Reflection) who was excluded from the Pleroma
and sought refuge on earth, 212a. Charis: Iren, i 1; Bonner (1) 178 f: Koptic
Gnostic treatise. Also PMG xii 229 and Hippol. vi 37 ff.

68. Ruska (2); Steele for full details. Also Ferguson i 39; Holmyard (7) 56 f; Rod-
well 62; T. Thomson i 10; Waite (2) ii 243.

Galienus is gen. taken as form of Galen, but there was a later alchemist of this
name, a bishop’s scribe: Paris 6514. Another Galienus is said to have summarised,
or commented on, a coll, of natural magic. Liber Vaccae , Liber Institutionum , or
Liber Anagnensis : Steele 5. For rel. to Apollonios (Balinas): Ruska 178; Steele 5;
Nau, rev. de For. chret. 2nd s. ii 1907 105. Holmyard rashly thinks the Table “one of
the oldest alch. fragments known”: Ruska is more cautious.

69. Ruska 114; Steele 4.

70. Read 148.

71. Read 148-52, plates 32 and 35. The Table was known in 13th c.; referred to
by Albertus Magnus. Holmyard found a corrupt Arabic version in work ascribed
to Geber.

72. Stapleton (5) 76, xi, and 88; AG 18-21.

73. Stapleton (5) 75, ix, and 87.

74. Ib. 81, xxi, and 89. Subtle and Gross are rep. in Greek by pneuma and pysche
opposed to soma, Stapleton 80, xvii. High and Low, 84, xxix; Up and Down of
Vapours, 77, xiv; rel. to Aristotle, 90.

75. AG 53, 13 and 138.

76. Stapleton (5) 82, xxiii. Dialogue-. AG 295.

77. All this from de Rachewiltz (2) 169-75, figs. 80 f. Translations of nadi: De
Campigny, J. Marques-Riviere, Evans-Wentz (Le Bardo Tbodol). Evans-W. 125
for Brahma-danda. Aion has meaning spinal marrow , Hymn Hermes 42, 119.

78. Stele (Berlin Mus.): Marucchi, II Grande pap. Egiffo 1888 p. 5 n. 1; Kopt:
EGW i 297 f; Pyr. 386b, 401a, 2037a. Imakh: EGW i 81 f; Gardiner (3) 465 n. F 39;
Dawson JEA xxii 107. Night-sun: EGW i 81 n. 12; P. Leyd. T 71 Sa: EGW iv
8 n. 14 and iii 414. Also Schiaparelli, Libro dei Funerali 387.

79. Lewy (2) 43 f; Porph. in Euseb. pr. ev. v 8, 11 f. Noises: Iambi, de myst. iii
6 etc. Cf. Montanos, “Behold the man is like a Lyre and I fly up to him like a
plektron,” Epiph .pan. haer. xlviii 4, 1, and Odes of Salomo: Lewy 46 n. 147; also
46 for theory of possession.

80. Derchain (2) no 448 and no 214. Goat-headed staff or sceptre, no 211; bearded
god (? Sarapis) with star on head holds a snake-twined trident and cadeceus in his
two hands, no 208; cuirassed male figure holds an undulating serpent each hand,
with a trophy on his head, 20 287; man carrying three whips walks on a smaller
prostrate figure, each has a star on head, while on the reverse a daimon with two
heads (lion, cock) holds an undulating serpent in each hand, no 258; a skeletal ibis¬
headed figure holds a snake in each hand, no 197, etc.

81. Hyppol. ref. v 12; John x 7.

82. Hyg. astr. vii: cf. Oxy. 2688. In general J.F.M. de Waele, Magic Staff of Rod in
G. R. Antiquity (esp. pi. opp. 213). The papyrus has 3 snakes in the caduceus.

For Sah: C. J. Bleeker, Eg. Fests. 1967 136.

Macrob. sat. i 19 says the Egs. interpret the cad, os genesis.

NOTES

415

IX. ISIS

1. AG 28-33 and 33—5; MSS 2327 f256 and 2329; Hoefer i 290; Scott iv 145-9;
R (1) 141 f; F (1) i 253 ff, cf. MS 2327, f 261.

I use 2329. For oath: PGM iv 1705; Cumont (14) 152 1-5 and 154; BC ii 313A,
4b and 315 n. 8; AG 57 f. In magic: Hopfner (1) ii par. 35; Vett. Val. 151 1 f and
172, 27.

To Son: CH xiii 3; Vett. Val. 361, 17; KK i 32; Cumont (14) 155 and 158 f;
Hopfner (1) ii par. 35 and i par. 728; Dietrich (1) 52 f.

2. AG 89, 8; F (1) i 253.

3. PGM xiii 795; T. bar Konai: BC ii 126-9. Star: Luke xxi 25.

4. Bousset (3) 382 connects with doctrine attrib. to Setheans by Epiph. haer.
xxxix 3, 5 (Holl 74, 15), which also links Seth (assimilated to Zoroaster, BC i 45)
with Jesus.

5. Hermes: Zielinski 356-8; F (2) iii p. clxviii. Psais: R (1) 141-4.

6. De is. iii, 352ab, cf. R (1) 136 n. 4.

7. PGM xxiv a 1 and viii 22. Diod. i 27; inscrs. of Ios and Andros (F. Hiller de
Gaestringen), I.G. xii fasc. v pt. 1 1903; Peak; Harder; F (3) and (4) etc.

8. CH i 62-5 (v, 6 and 11); par. 8 uses analogy of painting or statue.

9. Diod. i 25, 5f. Hereditary priesthoods: Egypt, Otto ii 200 f; Chaldeans, Diod.
ii 29; mages, Rapp Zeit. DMG xx 70 ff; MMM i 10 n. 3 and 239 n. 4; Bardasanes in
Pair. Syr. ii 602; Kosmas Hieros, in CCAG viii 3, p. 120.

10. CH iv 21 f (frag, xxiii 65-8). Philosophy and magic: Cumont (1) 164 n. 4;
medicine, 122 and 151 ff; Plout. de san. tuend. 1; Galen scr. min. 2, 1 (Muller);
Delatte, anec. athen. ii 1939 456.

11. Wilcken chr. 70 76.

12. Dolger (1) i 86-9; 66-72 and 317 (Mithras); Tert. depraescr. haer. 40. Dolger
ii (1930) 110-6 (Attis); 297-300 (Dionysos); 291-6 (Atargatis). Early Mesopotamia:
Contenau (1) 233.

13. JHS 1888 1; BM Cat. E301. Jane Harrison (1) 463.

14. De ser num. vind. xii; also Phanokles in Stob. flor p. 399 v 13. Ridgeway,
Early Age of Greece i 398, argues pre-greeks tattooed, but the Achaians did not take
it over. Babelon 128 argues for scars left from blows as ritual marks. Dolger 294-6.
Semeia also means omen, portent.

15. PSI x 1162; Cumont (14) 155 f. Herald: IG v 1, 1390 (Ditt. 736, line 115);
CIL vi 500 and 504 (Dessau 4148, 4153); RE keryx esp. 351; AJA xviii 1914 244;
Sardeis VII i, inscrs. ed. Buckler-Robinson p. 12 no 8, 12 f. Also the Krater: here
above ch. 8 n. 41.

Kabeiric: Wilcken AfP x 1932; Sarapiastai with Ka- as Kanopos and Jewish
influence at beginning: Momigliano aeg. xii 131 ff. Augustus: Dion Kass. Iv 31.

16. Budge (5) 247 for rep.

17. Proshymnos: Clem, protr. ii 30P; priest, strom. vi 4, 37, 1. For archangel of
dekans see later.

18. Met. xi 11.

19. Amelung, Sculpt. Vat. Mus. ii pi. vii, 55; Perdrizet (5) 48-50 pi. xii; AA xxi
1906 139; Schede angelos i 1926 pi. iv; J. Colin Mem. Ec. Fr. Rome 1920 pi. 1;
Mancini n.sc. 1925 137—9; Tran Tam Tinh 95. Cf. also Aula Isiaca on Palatine, Rizzo
lepitture dell' A.I. 32 fig. 32 (cf. figs. 34 f.) Contents, not phallos: TTT, cf. Clem.
strom. vi 4, 37, 1; Diod. i 97; Plout. de is. 36. J. Leipoldi angelos i 1925 127; Dolger
v 1930 153—87, esp. 156 ff. Dekans: CH iii p. xlv ff, sons of dekans assimilated to
daimons, p. liii-iv

20. B (1) 129 and 36; MS 2327 f 249V; AG 26, 11. B cites Diod. iii 12 f and
Agathark. GGM i 126 for these places as metallurgical centres. The list comes after
a treatise of John the Archpriest: Mark f 138 entitles it Of Metallic Stones. For John:
2327 f243~9; B (1) 187. In the treatise which shows interpolations, he invokes in

NOTES

417

416

Gnostic terms the celestial and demiurgic natures. Unity and Triad, and cites
Demok. and Zos. Date: prob. 5th c., B (2) ii 263 and 130, 4; T (2) 118.

21. Synk. 105, in Loeb Manethos 44-6, fr. 14; Euseb. (Synk. 106) ib. fr. 15;
Armenian (Chron. i 97), ib. fr. 16. For Zos’s book under patronage of Sophe
(Souphis): B (1) 58 and 159.

22. R (1) 141 n. 3 ; F (1) l 256 n. 2. Egyptian months in alch. texts: MS 2327 f 280
and f 287V: B (1) 33 f. Egyptian language: mixtures of Egyptian (hieratic or demotic)
in Leyden papyri, B (1) 84. Zos.: 2259 f8i; Olymp. 2327 f2i9v; B (1) 134. Note 7
springs in Mag. P. Berl i 235. Orphics: see JL (5) 36.

23. Cumont (1); Gundel (1); Nock (1).

24. Euseb. HE vi 32, 2; Jerome vir. ill. lxiii: Synk. 359b. Sok. HE ii 35. He
seems to have known Hebrew.

25. I '/it. Hilar, xxi (PLxxiii 38). Temple of Imhotep at Memphis famed for magic:
PGM vii 628; Hopfner ii par. 14 f, 181 f and 206; Synk. 248b (Dind. i 471; vors.
68 (55) B 300, 16); Cumont (1) 163 ff and 170 n. 2.

26. Cumont conjectured he was T. of Tralles.

Plin. xxix 5; Galen metb. med. i 1 f; 4 f; 8; 10 f; adv. Jul. 1 etc. Method of metasyn-
krisis: Caelius Aurelianua, de morb. acut. ii 38 (173); Soranus, de arte obstet. 128;
210, 212. The Latin version of the story calls T. a philosopher, which could mean
physician, e.g. Galen: AG 292 ff Kleo., R (9) 15, for alchemists. Methodihoi: O.
Temkin, Dumbarton Papers 1962 xvi. 98; Dioskorides studied at Byz. as great botanist,
ib. 100.

27. Letter to a King: Hopfner (1) ii par. 36. Here Claudius or Nero. R(3) 127 m 1;
Nero, Delatte (6) 801, cf. CCAG viii 4, 234.

28. Thorndyke ii 324; Cumont (7) and (8); R (3) 127-31; Nock (5) 108 f and (1)
163-5; F (5). Latin version adds, “There are more herbs and stones on earth by
whose mediation man may win immortality; but it’s inconvenient that some men
should know their operations; for, while owning a brief life, they do not hearken
to, or observe, the god’s laws and precepts; how much worse would they be if they
had immortal life.” The god then ascends.

For throne: cf. Komarios, R (3) 129; F (5) 62 n. 26. Tbeiaphone-, phrase consecrated
to revelations: ib. 63 n. 31.

29. Strom, xxvi 46 (816) adds, “The priests are said to have been mostly astrono¬
mers and philosophers,” goes on about their astronomy and calendar-lore. “They
attribute to Hermes all wisdom of this particular kind.”

30. Hopfner (1) ii par. 70-5; F (5). Theurgy: PGM iv 475 ff. Medium: Hopfner
ii par. 273-92.

31. Hippol. iv 32 and 35; Hopfner (1) ii par. 152 f; Ganschinietz, Hippol. Capitel
gegen die magier, TU xxxix 2, 1913, Hippol. goes on about an advent of Hekate.

32. Gans. 63; Kyranides i 3, 12; Hopfner (1) iii par. 12. Phosphorescense, B (2) ii
353 > 5! 94 _ 7 - 110 ff- Against wall, not on ground: Hopfner ii par. 152. Cf. marion¬
ettes, Heron autometop. xxx 1. Other light-effects: Hopfner ii par. 153; Bidez (9) 79 f;
Cyprian of Antioch conf. 3-6 (Baluze 1107); R (9) 51.

33. F (5) 69; PMG iv 286; in gen. Delatte (6) 71-82. There are phrases from the
LXX. See also two magic texts for gathering: PGM iv 286 ff; F (5) 70; see Delatte
(6). Addressing plant to be gathered, not snatched, personifying it: F (5) 70 n. 1;
Delatte (6) 60 on kathartic value; F (12) 299 f. Myrrh personified and prayed to:
PGM iv 149b; Hopfner (1) par. 485; P. Oslo i (PGM xxxvi 333 ff); raising-up of
plants, Lewy (2) 231.

34. PGM iv 2978; F (5) 70 f. Isis of Dew: PGM xii 234. Ka: Hopfner—Priesen-
danz takes it as Mnevis, citing Plout. de is. 20. Abyss: bythos. Used in Gnostic sense,
cf. PGM xii 229; Hippol. vi 37 ff. Not Agathodaimon: F (5).

35. Contenau (1) 155!; (2) 161; 318 n. 4. based on S. Langdon (3), Seleukid text.

X. ANCIENT AND CONTEMPORARY CRAFTS

1. See Eliade (1) chs. 9 f; Tegnaeus, De Heros Civilisateur-, K. Meuli, Hermes Ixx
1935 121—76; H. Ohlhaver, Der german. Schmied u. sein Werk^eug 95 ff; R. Eisler,
DasQuain-geichen in; R. Andree, Die Metalle bei Naturvolken etc.

2. Eliade 99 f.

3. Forbes (1) i 124; kohl, ix 165 f; in gen. Ambix 1938 ii 3-16.

4. Forbes (1) i 128. Much more might be added on secrecy :F (1) i 127; Contenau
(1) 188; Ghalioungui 47; Clem, strom. v 7; Plout. de is. 7 etc etc. Cf. crypograms in
Egyptian texts; magical alphabets etc.; jargon in magic, Bonner (1) 11 and 196;
Jerome ep. lxxv 3, 1 (CSEL 55); palindromes; jumbling-up of names.

5. Reports of excavs. in 1968.

6. Dubs (2) 23 f; Singer i 581-4.

7. Dubs. 24.

8. J. A. Knudtzon, Die El-Amama Tajeln\ S. A. B. Mercer, Tell el-Amarna
Tablets-, no 10, lines 19 f; also 7 lines 71 f.

9. Singer as in n. 6 above.

10. Forbes (1) i 125.

11. Lucas (1) 85 ff. Akkadian terms: Forbes l.c. table ix.

12. Holmyard (2) 13 f. Gulkisar: C. Thompson (4) and Contenau (1) 187 f.
Continuity in several terms, e.g. shadanu : Arabic sbadana (haematite); sipru seems to
lead to sapphire and to mean “scratching stone”. We meet kibaltu, but are not sure
if it is cobalt.

13. Lucas 259 ff. Refs, to fine gold in records of 20-21 Dyns. Holmyard 6 f for
terms. Medes and Egs. as goldsmiths at Sousa under Dareius, Olmstead 168.

14. Diod. iii 1; Petrie (2) 94. Goldplating, Lucas 265; electron 267.

15. Glass: Lucas 207 ff; cobalt 217 f. Till late in Egypt materials for glass were
quartz sand, calcium carbonate, natron or plant-ash with colouring matter.

16. Lucas 178 ff: he thinks sequence may really have been glazed solid quartz
before powder, finally glazed steatite.

17. Glazes: Lucas 178 ff; faience 185 ff; uncertain when lead glaze came in—
Ptol. or Roman? 190-2; Origins of glazing 194-8.

18. Orph. I .itb. 201 ff; Plin. xxxvii 124.

19. Forbes (1) i 128; Langdon (1) 339.

20. Light-dark: Langdon (1) 339. See also Langdon (2) 337; BM, CT 24, 49. 3b,
K4349; tablets, VAT 9874, K 11151. Forbes (1) i 128. See Table of metals and
planets in Partingdon (3) 62 f.

21. T (1) 19; B (1) 224.

22. R. Clarke 60 f; Budge (5) 12-6.

23. T (1) 33-7; brass, T (2) 127 f; alloys, T (1) 35.

24. Only evidence for private ownership, dubious reading in P. land. 144.

25. SEHRE 342; in gen. 688-91, nn. 100-2.

26. Philostr. Apollon, vi 2; Lucas; copper in Fayum SPP xxii 48; BGU 197;
copper and kadmeia, Cyprus, Plin. xxxiii 131 (166); tin. P. Holm, and Leyd., cf.
Leontius, vita S. Ioann. Eleom. iii 15. Clem. paid, ii 3, laments use of gold and silver
vessels, but does not say where from.

27. BGU 1127; A. C. Johnson no. 228 addressed to Achaios presiding over the
Tribunal at the Palace.

28. Lond. 906; Wilck. chr. 318; Johnson no. 236. For wording cf. P. Amh. 92;
W. cbr. 311, Herakleia a.d. 162-3; Johnson no. 210, tax on sale of oil for press.

29. V. Martin. Logisterion: private or official bureau? Chrysochoos in Od. iii 425
for gilder of sacrificial victim’s horns.

See also P. Strassb. 92, 4 (3rd c. B.C.); Ostr. Bod. i 304 (2nd c. B.c.); Baillet
inscr. gr. et lat. des tomb, des rois 1076.

30. Oxy. 1117.

NOTES

41B

31. Archives Isidor. ed Boak and Youtie i960 no. 62. For the law: Wenger,
Quellen d. rom. Rechts 469 f; Schonbauer JJP ix-x 1956 95.

Blanchet, Pr. verb. Soc.fr. Mum. 1899 pp. xvi ff and xlviii IF; Et. de Mum. ii 1901
195 ff and 224 ff; Mau, Rom. Mitt, xvi 1901 109 ff; SEHRE i 96. (Taken as mint:
RM xxii 1907 198 ff; Mum. Chroti. 1922 28 ff; Hermann, Denk. Malerei 37.) Nego¬
tiator: Della Corte, Riv. Ind.-Gr.-Ital. vi 1922 104. Cf. shop of Pinarius Cerialis,
caelator. For blacksmith’s shop: Brusin, Aquileia 1929 118; SEHRE 176. Smith,
seated in chair, holds with tongs the iron he hammers on anvil; a boy or slave
behind blows furnace-fire with bellows fixed to a protective shield. Products shown
on right: tongs, hammer, spear-head, lock.

32. Fuad Univ. P. viii no 7. Text is bad; may mean, “I paid you 32 dr. for the
long cloth of the embroiderer. I didn’t write you by letter to get 80 dr. from Hierissa,
for the remaining ... on account, for the mirror.”

33. Oxy. 1582.

34. Oxy, 1870.

35. Ptol., Tebt. 1086; 890; also 121 (94 or 61 b.c.), payments to various minor
officials, etc. including goldsmith, line 18; includes barber and chalkeus. Goldsmith
in Oxy. 2727; chalkeus, etc., in Panopolis Pap. (Dublin),

36. As goldsmith: Philostorg. HE iii 13; St. Greg. Naz. c. eunom. 292nd and
293d; Sok. iii 15. At Alex., Philost. Theodoret HE ii 23. Irreverence: Epiph.
adv. haer. par. 2 cf. 6 (p. 920), also 76; praef. ap. S. Ep. cf. 4; morals, ib. 76 par. 4.
Writings only cited in Epiphanios.

37. JEA xlii 1956 122 f; xxx 1944 76 f. Cf. fabrica aeraria, officina aeraria, officina
aerariorum; Ties. Eing. Eat. sv.; H. Bluemner 324, cf. Quint, inst. ii 21, 10.

38. Oxy. 989; 1912; 1913, cf. 1027. Oxy. 84; Od. iii 432 and ix 391.

39. Oxy. 135. Lead at Syene: Tait OP 310. For Smith at work; Oxy 113; JL (4)
46. Names for iron in Gr,.and Latin: L. Deroy, AC xxxi 1962 98 ff

40. Lucas 156 ff; Plin. xxxviii; Theophr. lap. Blanckenhorn, aegypten 201 ff.
Magical stone found at Thebes, GGM 654; see also Johnson 349 n. 29.

41. Budge (4) i 97 f.

42. Plin. xxxvii 75 f (197-200).

43. Clem .protepr. iv 43P; FHG iii 487 f ft. 4. Apis: Diod. i 85; Plout. de is. 43;
Budge (6)i 60, 397 ff etc.

44. Wheeler; Filliozat, Virapatnam may have been on the China-route. Embassies:
Needham (1) i 200. See tables, 192 f: coral and pearls from Red Sea, amber from
Baltic or Sicily—via Syrian merchants?

45. Hirth (1) 243; Needham (1) i 199. Cobra-stone: Riddell.

46. Hirth (1) 48; for glass see Johnson 241. Note how work by men like Ting Lluan
and Ma Chun takes up mechanical toys of the sort developed by Ktesiphon etc. It is
my opinion that Chinese contacts with Syria were earlier and fuller than is generally
recognised and that many ideas or practices taken as Chinese derive from Syria. Sec
Needham 200-3 on hyssus and storax\ water-clocks 203 f; Trepanation and theriaka
204-6 etc.

47. Needhan (1) i 197.

48. Johnson 241. Topazos: Plin. xxxv 39; caer. xxxiii 161 f; Yitruv. vii 11, i;
Theoph. lap. 55. Frit: Lucas 139 ff. Paraetonium (Plin. xxxv 36; Vitruv. vii 7) and
sinopis (Plin. xxxv, 31, 35) from Egypt are prob. gypsum & red ochre. See further
Johnson 350.

49. Dyeing: Lucas 172-7; Muschler ii 798, 919; Hdt. iv 189; Loret kemi iii 1930-3
23, 32; Plin. xxxiii 57; xxxv 25, 27; Vitruv. vii, 14, 2. Woad: Oxy 1279, 593, 729,
1052, 1685. Dyes: Pfister (1) 40 f and (3); safflower Pf. (3), Lucas 176. Secret methods;
Plin. xxxv 130. Ancient nature of purple dying in Phoinikia: Akkadian form of
Canaan is Kinakhkhu (purple), B. Maisler, Bull. Am. Soc. Or. Res. cii 1946 7-12;
cf. Phoinikia, E. A. Speiser, Eanguage xii 1936 121-6.

50. Temple: PP xxii 183 (a.d. 138); Johnson no 397. Government-control:

NOTES 419

Mich. 123R vi 16 f; under Claudius, ib. 126, 6. Lessor: Lond. 286. Priestly monopoly:
Wallace taxation 200.

51. Tebt. 287; Wilck, chr. 251; Johnson no. 396. For guilds: Harris 73. (At
Thyatira: IGRiv 1265.)

52. Ryl. 98 with various refs.; Johnson no. 239.

53. Oxy. 2575; Telones baphikes not elsewhere attested, but cf. Ryl. 98.

54. Oxy. 1648.

55. Oxy. 1041; Pringsheim aeg. xiii 3-4 1932 406-18.

56. Rees, Hermop. no 30. For legal form: J. Modrzejewski JJP 7-8 1933-4 218
n. 34; W. L. Westermann JJP ii 1948 9 ff, esp. 24. The conjecture por ( phyrai ) here
might be wrong, e.g. pro {baton), cf. Hib. i 32, 14, 16.

Other Byz contracts with purple-dyers: Grenf. ii 87 (SB 4303) a.d. 606; Erman &
Krebs, Ausd.Pap. d. k. Museen; Johnson and West, Byz- Egypt 124 no 219, made by
purple-dyer of This w ith purple-dealer in Panopolis; cf. PSI viii 902 (Mich, v 355).

57. Rees, no 32-3.

58. C. P. Jud. iii no 511: P. Ross. Georg, iii 38; F. Zucker BZ xxxii 1932 87 ff;
Pistorius indicio antinop. 1939 18, 29, 31; Taubenschlag, Eaw of GR Egypt (2nd ed.)
365 n. 4; 366 n. 21. For lease, aeg. xiv 80 ff; Hermann, St. %. Bodenpacht 92 ff;
Steinwenter Das Recht d. Kopt. Urk. 38.

See also Oxy. 736 (a.d. i); 1293 (117-35); I 5 I 9 (257—8) ; Abinnaios nos. 71-5.

39. Doresse 223. Philip, Matthew and Thomas are cited as those to whom the
task of gospel-writing were allotted by Jesus.

60. Oxy. 2567; manager for the O. nome got a duplicate. See notes in Oxy. xxxi
as to epitroposHermou. For items: Gazza. Misydion, diminutive: Galen xix 736; Diosk.
v 100; schistes, Plin xxxv 186, commin recipes, Gazza 104; J. R. Llarris 185 ff; P.
Holm, index. Pfister (1) thinks alum maybe found in fissures of certain schists.
Psobthis: Oxy. 485, see also Calderini Rend. R. 1 st. Eomb. lviii 1925 529; Wilck. chr.
321 proves alum on camelback from Little O. to Fayum; but all the oases had alum
and ochre. Uses of alum: Weidemann (2) 610.

61. BGU 697;W. chr. 321; Johnson no 349. Tax: ? diapylion (Oxy. 1439). Advance
P. Col. 1 R 4X (a.d. 155, camel transport) ; BGU 1564 (a.d. 138, clothing requisition).

62. Oxy. 2116; Johnson no 242—writing through secretary. Cf. Oxy. 977;
Fay. 93; W. chr. 317; ib. 237.

63. Forbes (1) iii 3; 43 n. 12; 44 n. 15 and n. 13.

64. Ib. 44 (21). Egyptian god of scents. Chesmu: BIFAO lviii 31.

65. Perfumes: Lexa i 103 f. Hatshepsut: Urk. iv 219. 13 to 220, 6. Incense:
hieratic pap. Berl. no 3053 1, 2 to 2, 4 (Amun). Funeral fumigation, e.g. Naville TB
tab. ii Ag; iii Pe, la. Da, Le; iv Ba, Le. With offerings: index Pyr. texts. Capture:
Tab. Piankhi, lines 97 & 102 f; Urk. iii 33, 4; 38, 3-5. Mazar for perfume (balm)
factory of King Josiah by Dead Sea at Engedi on royal estate where the folk (? a
guild) grew and made balm; workshop may have been in a fortified settlement on
Tell el-Jurn.

66. L. & L. 6, 1 to 8, 11.

67. Repel: Berl. pap. 6, 3-5 (Lexa ii 103 f); Lexa ii 136. Vase: L. & L. 3, 5-35;
Lexa ii 135 f.

68. Resins were used and some of ingredients must have acted as fixations;
classical authors well aware of this principle, which must have been long known.
Egyptian terms: Forbes (1) iii 12.

69. Forbes 17 & n. 37. Galena is lead sulphide; black galena is coupled with green
malachite in the texts. This copper compound is found in early Tasian graves up to
19th dynasty; galena eye-paint from Badarian times up to Koptic. Stibnite and
galena imperfectly differentiated: Forbes ix 165; medical uses, ib. Kohl: iii 18.

70. Forbes (1) iii 18; 20; 22 nn 57 f. Colouring perfumes, 31; Theophr. odours.
Alexandreia: Plin. xx xii 59; Forbes 36, Johnson 4 and 473 (prices).

71. Sublease: Fay. 83 (a.d.) 161; Johnson no 238. See Oxy. 920, mustard; 1142,

420

NOTES

421

pepper; 2144, frankincense; BGU 9, 3 rd-c. tax of 60 dr. a month paid by aromato-
poles and myropoles of Arsinoe.

72. Mendes: Athen. xv 688 f; Forbes iii 14; Plin. xxxiii 164 and xvi 40, Seplasia.
White lead much used by Greek ladies on faces; found as round tablets in Athenian
tombs of 3rd c. B.C.; Roman ladies used it, earth-of-Chios, or white excrement of
crocodiles: Forbes iii 39 f; Xenophon oikon. x; Martial i 72, 5 etc. The use of lead
produced many poisonings and deaths. Rhypos (filth): in magic text, P. Mag. Osl. i
332

73. Philon, heir to div. things xli.

74. Kiddushin 82b.

75. Forbes (1) iii 12, table iv.

76. AG 145 par. 3; T (1) 36.

77. J. P. Arnold, Origin & Hist, of Beer 1911; H. F. Lutz, Viticult. &■ Brewing in
Anc. Orient 1922 78; P. Montet, Les scenes de lavieprivee 253 f; Lucas 20 f. Cooks and
ritual: Athen. xiv 659 ff. And J. M. Stillman, Paracelsus 37.

XI: MARIA THE JEWESS

1. MS 2327 fi22 & 204; T (2) 118.

2. MS 2314 (9th c.). We have also seen names like Petasios, Petosiris; Pammenes,
cited by Olymp.; Pibechios (Pe-Beck, Hawk of Horos); Epibechios, 2327 H38.

3. Kleo. 2327 f74; Alex, in Mark f2; Julian 2327 £242.

4. B (2) ii 300-15; 2327 fz68v. Treatise :B(i) 123, 171, also 55 and 123; Moses, 76.

5. Mark 185; B (1) 54, 83; AG 38 f, 13-29, 4. T (1) 34-6; T (2) 129.

6. Lexa ii 141; BM 10.070; Leyd. J. 383 is parts of the book; Griffith (2) early

3rd V. A.D., V 12, I-I3; 9.

7. Mark 102V, cf. 2249 fioio, and 23271255; B (1) 171. Exorcisms.Seals: Vassiliev,
anecdota 332; P. land. 14, i 6 (Christian text); CCAG vi 84 ff; Schlumberger REG v
71-93; Mouterde etc.

8. Zos. 2327 f82; Bible 2249 £98, Mark 190V. Recipe, Leyd. 75a.

9. Doresse 107a; E. Petersen; “Mithr. Lit.,” F (1) i 303 ff.

10. MS 2327 fzo; 2249 f 9 8 (Hoefer i 534); Mark fi 9 o; B (1) 64 f. Note also name
Maria Kleophas, B (1) 172. Adam and 4 corners = cosmos.

T W 37 f and figs. 3 f; the accounts of operations and utensils here depend
mainly on Taylor. B (1) 60.

Book of Sophe the Egyptian (attrib. Zos. AG 211, 12) cites Maria and may be
Jewish. Note Sophar in Anon (AG 120, 19: given incorrectly to Zos. in Paris A
fi68v: AG 118: see BC ii 331 f; CMAG ii 6 f and 21 (f2v, no 4); Lagercrantz (4)
18 ff): seems Shapur (Sapor), cf. CMAG iv 39b. Bes pantheos: Derchain (2) 162.

12. B(i) 236 T(i) fig. 5

13. T (1) 42 f and fig. 7.

14. T (1) 47 ft

15. T (1) 49 f.

16. See above ch. 7 n. 34.

17. Stapleton (5) 71, ii. For Arabic ideas of body, soul, spirit in 10th c., Stapleton
( 7 )-

18. See above ch. 6 n. 16; Zos., AG 266 par. 16. Stapleton suggests term Angel
here is translation of Pneuma.

19. Stapleton (5) 72, iii. Many names: AG 182, 14 (Hermes).

20. Ib. 72, iv, cf. 73 v and vi.

21. AG 5; Stapleton (5) 86. Marble: AG 162, 14.

22. Blochet 106; BC ii 352 & 325-7; Manget, Biblioth. chem. 1702 i 515 f; R (9);
2 4 < 5 gg; Ruska (4) i 43. R (9) 71 n. 1 thinks Book of Mary the Kopt is an Egyptian
version of Aramaic original.

For Christian taking-over of alch. idiom: Cod. Barocc. 50 f 3 75 (R. Bentley, cf.
Malalas 686, Bonn). “Oracle of Ostanes on the Theokotos. Let us honour Mariam as
having beautifully hidden the Mystery.” Christ’s Birth (and Death) are seen as
alchemic. In general: von Premerstein.

XII: KLEOPATRA

1. Chwolsohn (2) 129 n. Aetios: latrika. Her books cited as late as 7th c., Paulos
of Aigina. Weights etc.: Hultsch i 253; 2327 f 15 f, Mark fio8v; cited, Galen etc.,
B (1) 173.

2. B (2) 289; (1) 173; Hammer-Jensen: taken as early and of Egyptian origin.

3. R (1) 704 takes her as avatar of Isis; BC ii 326 n. 1; B (1) 290; R (9) 24, also 7;
R (2) 129, Komar. Cf. vision of Krates after ascent to heaven: R (1) 361. Ostanes in
dream: BCii 347 and 311-5, invocation; Zosimos, AG 108 ff; R (1) 368 and (3) 312 f.

4. AG 289 ff; R (9) 21 & (10) 66 n. 2, also on Komarios; F (7) 74.

5. Synthema'. whole made up of parts, Apollod .poliork. 180, 9; ointment made of
several ingredients, P. Mag. Berol. i 256; medical mixture, hippiatriha 22; chemical
compound, ps. Demok. 55b.

6. Mark fi99v; 2249 fg6; 2327 f^3; AG 292. Sun-sign: B (1) 63.

7. Following Taylor’s translation; see refs, end of ch. xxx xi; Browne (3).

8. JL (5) (5) 51; the whole ch. there; also Cumont (12) 4th ed. 24; Vieler AfR
xxx 1933 243 ff; R (9) 20 for borrowing; AG 298, 12; Puke xi 27, cf. BC ii 333 n. 10.

9. Three rings: 2327^96; iz-fi, two circles of snake; stylised, 2325 f82 and 2327
f220. Metal symbols, 2327 f22o; no circles, 2327 f8o.

10. B (1) 84 f; PGM xii 238. MS 2327 f274v and £215. Chrysorichtes not in Lidell-
Scott. Leyd. Pap. 75 continues with the numerical table as to illness; formula for
separating married couple; cause insomnia causing death; friendship philtre made of
plants, minerals, magic letters; explanations of mystic names of plants etc.

11. PGM i 143 ff; Bonner (1) 15. Magic work in the O.: Bonner 194. Metternich
stele: Bonner 158; Budge gods ii 273 etc. The composite form of Bes is often called
pantheos. Pantheos: Nock (5) 294.

12. Bonner (1) 254, D5; 256, D17 cfDi8. Womb: 273 D29, D131, cf. D132-42,
D145; Harpok., 287 D205; scarab 294 D251; three rings 302 D293; rider D296f
(Chnoubis symbol, rev. 296); six rays, 299 D273; trident 278 D153; insers. D217,
271, 286 f, 290. Also Chabouillet nos. 2. 176 f, 2. 180, 2. 194, 2. 196, 2. 201 -b.

See PGM ii pi. i fig. 4, amulet of O. with heads of Aion and Kmephis = F (1) iv
191. Much more might be added from Derchain (2), but we have enough here for
our purposes.

13. Bonner 265 D72, aniconic object on table may be form of Amun; and D354,
bloodstone, on rev. Harpok. on lotus. In gen., Kopp palaeogr. crit. iii 33 (gems);
Hopfner (1) ii par. 136 f.

14. Aion: F (1) iv 152 ff, esp. 182 ff, mag. pap.; Vermaseren 125-8; Helios
Mithras e.g. PGM iv 516; Nilsson (2) 62 f.

15. PGM iv 1115. Stars, stoicheia ; revolutions, dinesis. Love as assim. to Aion, F
(1) iv 186 n. 3, e.g. pap 1781 ff. Pteryges : winged as roof of celestial vault.

16. See n. 10 above.

17. PGM vii 505 ff. Mixture, synkrasis; ever-reborn, palingenes. This invocation
is a syntaxis with the daimon of the place; see H. Hanse RGVV xxvii 1939 14 n. 1;
Preis. on PGM iv 216. The 5 Planets are in gen. the others than Sun and Moon.
R (1) 190 n. 7 thinks Sun and Moon = Aion and Physis and the 5 planets = the 5
Iranian elements.

18. PGM i 309. Aion as god of fire and light, PGM iv 516 ff; Helios as Mithas,
ib. 587, 640, 482, also 602. Serpent as red, see above Ibn Umail. Cf. AG I v 21 “and
from (the serpent) comes the Red of Cinnabar, as they say, and this is the Cinnabar
of the Philosophers,” see Stapleton (5) 74 n.

422

NOTES

19. Psellos comm. 113 be and Prok. rep. ii 133, 17; Lewy (2) ch v etc.

20. Lewy 92 f and 98; also 86-8 and 95. Dteams: Rohde psycheii 84, 3; Mart. Cap.
ii 151. Limits: Psell. hyp. 14 (p. 74, 34). Psyche: Lewy 85 & 87; Psell. exp. 1153a.
Plato, thaiet. 17627.

21. Artemid. ii 13; Legley Mel. Ec. Rome lx 1948 136 If; Deonna (1) 130 ff.
Macrob. sat. i 19 and i 9; RA 1920 i 131. Also BCH 1913 262.

22. Claudian was much interested in phenomena like the Magnet; the imagery of
the Phoenix etc. In some respects he is the forerunner of Nonnos.

23. Horap. i 1.

24. Snakes: Galen theriaka viii (K. xiv 235); Budge (5) 94. Asp: Ail. x 31; Plout.
de is. 74; in gen. Diod. i 11 & Plout. 41 & 43. Diadem: Ail. NA vi 38 cf. x 31; on
basilisk ii 5, cf. Nikandr. ther. 408; Heliodoros iii 8.

25. Hopfner fontes 657; Migne lxxvi 961; Artem. ii 13 (Hercher 106).

26. Boas 28; for serpent in art linked with time: Panovsky studies in iconog.
“Father Time” esp. pi. xxii, xxxiv.

27. Horap. i 2. Note these are his first two items, app. the most important symbols
he could think of. Weight, cf. Ailian vi 18. Plout, de is. Ixxiv, “The asp, as being
immortal and capable of motion without limbs, with equal facility and suppleness,
they liken to a star.” Both texts have leiotatos as adjective. Cf. Clem, strom. v 4.
Geras: Ail. ix 16; Physiolog. 37 f; Philon bybl. in Euseb. pr. ev. i 10, 48. Year, cf.
Servius ad aen. i 269. For year as ring, the cult of Anna Perenna.

28. Serv. ad aen. v 85. Prok in tim. iii (ii 247 D) attributes to Porphyr. the statement
that Egyptians have symbol of circle round a cross for cosmic soul. Euseb. pr. ev. i
10, 51 says Egyptians rep. the cosmos as air-shaped and fire-faced with a hierako-
morphos snake in middle, calling it the universe with Agathos Daimon in middle.
Meisi: Sbordone 123.

29. Horap; i 59-61 and 63 f. Hephaist. i 1 (Engelbrecht 65). Astrologers, cf. Ptol.
tetr. 175; Vett. Val. 170 f, 278, 314, 360; HT (Gundel 73); Firm. Mat. i 108 and 23.
Caracalla: IG ad res R. pert, i 1063; Cumont CRAI1919 315-23 and Textes Mith. 1899
i 289-92. Isis as kosmokrat. Oxy. 1380 line 20; only a few lamps show her sphere
(2nd-3rd cs.); prob. goes back to mid-2nd c., of popular origin, confined to Roman
Egypt.

30. Pistis Soph. (Mead) sect. 319, p. 320.

31. Leviathan, Job. Sheppard 88, cf. Greek Okeanos.

32. Acts Apostle Th. xxxii; Jonas 116; Origen c. cels, vi 25, 35; Liesegang 117;
Hilgenfeld 277 ff.

33. Pistis: Schmidt ch. 136, p. 262, 24, who takes as Barbelo-Gnostic. Macrob.
sat. i 20, 3 & i 9, 12; Philon Byb. (a.d. 42-117) FHG (Muller) iii 572, who cites
Sanchouniathon of Beirut, legendary figure given as 9th c. b.c.

34. B (1) 62 f; Philos, iv 48, 7 (Wendland 71); cult of constellations, Manil. v
289-93.

35. Ophites, Jonas (2) i 360; R (12) 1st part. ch. iv. Amann, Diet. The'ol. Cath.
xi 1063-75; R Liechtenham, Ophiten, Herzog-Haupt xiv 404-13.

Naasenes held Naas the Serpent to be him from whom “are all that under heaven
are named Temples,” Naoi: Hippol. ref. v 4; cf. v 12, the Peratai consider “the Son the
Serpent.” A text of the Book of the Dead, 175, says that the end of the world Atum the
demiurge will transform himself into a serpent (resume the form of the primordial
abyss from which he came, Derchain (3). Osiris, now completely spirit, will thus be
surrounded by the serpent; Derchain (2) 74 f, gem with mummy snake-twined
(lion-head on snake?); mummy has three-pointed crown, Derchain no 91.

36. R. Clarke 240 f.

37. Ih. 50; Pyr. text 1146.

38. Sethe Amun 63 and 12. But Khnum is typical demiurge.

39. CT iv spell 321; Clarke 51 f—also Univ. of Birmingham Hist. J. v 26.

40. Zepi in Louvre; Clarke 81 fig. 11.

NOTES

423

41. Osiris: JL (4) 79; (5) 82; Budge (5) 378- Sungod. JL (5) 55; Budge 97. Five-
headed snake: Budge 104. Nut, Budge 536 f. Serqet on her snake-boat propelled by
crocodile, 97. Snake Geb, 436. Snake between: Lanzoni diz- clix 8; two moreexs. in
book of Amduat (Jequier, Litre de ce qu’ily a dans I’Hades). Osiris and abyss:
Derchain (3).

More refs for O. in Egypt: Osiris, Champollion, mons., notes descr. ii pi. 615. In gen.
Hopfner (4) 13 6 ( Die Schlange ); Lanzoni diz- pi. clxxxix 3; cclxvi 23; lxxx (Bes on O.);
Med. VJjksmus. v Oudheden Leyden xxiv 1943 25 fffigs. 15 f; Pettazzoni (2) pi. V9-11;
vi 11; RA 1920 i 130 10-2; RHR xviii 1888 55; Prinz 9 pi. 1.2; pi 1 3 f.

42. JL (4) ch. iii.

43. Budge (5) 547, Nut and stars. Poikilia and Dionysiac transformation, JL (4)
380-5.

44. MS 2327 H96V and 279; Mark f94-

45. Budge (5) 516 etc.

46. Stephanos: T (4) 39 and 46. Petrifaction: T. in Amhix i 45 f. Term for lapidary,
kabidarios, seems not before 5 th c.

47 - T ( 4 ) 7 6 n - 74 -

48. AG iii 21-3.

49. Browne (1) 204 f and 208. Note on powder: Browne 208 f.

50. Browne 17.

51. Read 241. The brief flag of “Independent Fiume” had the Ourobors with the
7 Stars of the Great Bear: Deonna (1) 134; see 133-5 for refs, for post-classical uses.

More Ouroboros refs.: Hittites, Deonna (1) 28; Phoinikia, Macr. sat. i 9; ]■ Asiat.
1895-6 151; ii 1878 239; RA 1920 131 n. 3. Mesopotamia: two interlaced serpents
linking tails, Toscane, mem. deleg. perse xxi 1911 296 fig. 394; Roscher Lex. Sterne
1475 fig. 42; von Buse 53; RA 1920 i 131 fl Deonna (4) 163.

Animated spheres: Deonna (1) 118-25. Beginning and end: Flerakleitos; Cic.
nat. deor. ii 18; DL vii 35; Cumont (6) 123 n (Pythags.); deity as sphere: Xenophanes,
Diels tors (5) i 113, 21; ii 5, 40; 122, 11; 123; 12; Plato tim 33b; Seneca, ep. lxiii 29;
Cumont (6) 123ns Deonna (1) 119 etc. Globe as universe: Schlacter; Brendel;
F (1) ii 337; Deonna (1) 120-3. Also animated wheels, Kirke, Circus, Anna Perenna
etc.

XIII: WOMB FURNACE AND VASE

1. Boston 73; Eliade (1) 37; Forbes (1) i 127.

2. Eisler 116; Kunz 188; Eliade 37. Lapidaries: Ruska (1) 18, 165. Living stomes:
Plumpe. Fusion of ores, sexual, Kumarbi myth: Walcot, Hesiod and N.E. 2.

3. Lippmann (1) i 393.

4. Plin. xxxiii 101; Diosk. v 99; Forbes (1) ix 161. Prob. male is grannular type;
female, acicular. Bailey seems wrong in taking male as stibnite, female as antimony.

5. Plin. xxxvii 101.

6. Ib. xxxvi 25, 39; Theophr. lap.\i, also 37 and 28; Eicholz 36 f; 108 f. Sapphire,
lapis lazuli; kyanos, dark azurite crystals.

7. Plin. xxxvii 180.

8. Cline 117; Eliade 36. Amd Granet (2) 496.

9. Firesticks, index Frazer GB; Nonn. ii 493 ff.

10. Dyaks: A. Berthelot 23. Enoch liii 9 f; Zohar fi4b, 11, 152.

11. Eliade (1) 35 and app. D; S. Tolkowsky, hesperides 56, 129 f; Nonnos: JL (4)
321. Mages saw fire as bisexual. Firm. Mat. de err. 5 (Zieg.).

12. Eliade 36; Caraka v 3.

13. Eliade (1) 37 f.

14. Hippol. ref. v 14, 3. Horap. i 12.

15 . De is. xliii, cf. Plato symp 190b; E. Sparziono, Caracallus 7.

424

NOTES

16. Lauth for ring; Sethe Amm 63; Sbordone (1) 34 for play on Tan & Neil
(spelt backwards). Ptah-Tanen; Budge gods i 511 and Sethe 58 f; Lanzone 255 ff.
Amun and Amunet as father and mother, hermaphroditic: Sethe 33 f. In general
Delcourt. For Orphic Egg and 4 Elements: R. Turcam (Mart. Cap. ii 140), RHR
1961 clx 11-23.

17. QN iii 14.

18. Aisch. fr. 70 and 44, N (2nd ed.). Arist. met. A6, 98837; phys. 192223; Simplik.
256,14a, matter is opposed to efficient or final cause “as the female to the male or the
ugly to the beautiful.” See also Athen. xiii 533d on king instituting marriage in
Attika, “regarded as having a twofold nature.”

19. Iambi, theolog. arith. (3.21, 417 Falco). According to H. Oppermann {Gnomon.
v 1929 545 ff eso. 557 f) the TA is a series of extracts prob. of 7th Book of Synagogeoi
Pythag. doctrine by Iambi., cf. Arist. met. A5, 986215 ff.

20. Nich. Gerasa, in Phot. bibl. 143 Becker. Oriph: fr. 21a K. Val Sor., Aug
civ. dei vii 9 (287, 5-7 Domb.). Diogenes: Philod. depiet. 82 f; Gomp. dox’ 548b, 14 ff;
SVF iii 217, 9 ff. Chrysipp. ib. 80 dox. 547 b 16; SVF ii 316, 11, cf. SVF ii 3x5, n-
also Serv. aen. iv 638. And F (1) iv 45 n. 1, and Kleinknecht.

21. Oracle cited by Porph, dephil. ex or. hour. 1856 146 ff; Norden 228 ff, based on
Plato and Pythags. Xenokrates and opposition of monad and dyad, dox. 304b 1 II
and F (1) iv 48 f; Norden 229-31 for eastern basis; F. replies 47.

22. Lewy (2) 121; Hekate as cosmic soul: 6 f. Hymen: DL ix 32. Aristotle uses it
for both foetus and bowels.

23. Tetr. i 6 f; goes on as to assignment of the two destructive stars; Loeb ed.
40-2 for view of Cardan; Bouche-L. 102; cf. also tetr. i 12. Planets grow female by
occidental position, where they oppose the sun; and v.v. when oppose moon.
Bouche-L. 333 n. 3. See tetr. iii 14 for effects in making women tribades, etc.

24. CH i 11 f (i 15); see 21 for harmonia. Male-female, 22 n. 43 and n. 44 as to sleep.

25. C. W. Mitchell, St Ephraim’s Prose Refutation of Mani etc. 1921 ii 210: CH iv
152, cf. Macr. somn.i 12, 8; Pistis Sophia 131 (Sch. 217, 1st ed.; 246, 2nd.); Scott iv
164 n. 2.

26. Text no. 26; Doresse 245-7. The Latin text is milder. Symbolism of mystical
union among Pythags. Carcopino 120 f. Among Valentinians we meet the heavenly
marriage of Sophia and Saviour, compared with the Husband and Wife in a Cherno-
boskion text (Doresse 224), and the union of the Perfect with the Angels surrounding
the Saviour when the elect have entered the Pleroma: Sagnard 193 and 413-15, cf
Extraits de Tbeodote 64 f. Also Marcos (Iren, i 13); Manichees and Mandaians, Widen
gren (2) ch. viii; Fendt.

27. PGM vii 326, cf. Psalm x 4 and II Kings 22, 7. And PGM xiii 327; O.
Weinreich (2) 345 f; F (1) iv 196. Aia as magical name, cf. Aiaia etc., Kirke and
Medeia: JL (5) 7, 10-3, 63, 245, 367.

28. De is. lvi. Setheans: Doresse (1) 52; Philosophoumena v 19-22; Jonas (2) i 342.
Bruce codex with its series of wombs. Cf. Chaldean oracles.

29. B (1) 64; Zos. in Mark fi9ov; B (1) 63; Mark fi68v.

30. Stapleton (5) 76 f (xii, cf. xiii). Two vapours and three sisters; three marriages :
xiv. Marriages with 4 wives: xv. Cf. Qur’an Sura xxiii 12.

31. Ib. 76, x.

32. Cf. above about stones growing. Plin. on galena, xxxiv 49; cf. Strab. v 2;
Eliade (1) ch. iv for these and other exs., e.g. Cherokee shaman feeds crystal twice a
year with blood or it flies off and attacks humans, 45. Neith; Harris mag, pap. 501 —
BM io.042 (9, 5 to 12)+ Lexa ii 38.

33. Enuma elish iv 136 line 3; Eliade ch. vii for discussion.

34. Eliade 67 f.

35. Cline 121 and 118; Eliade 60.

36. Elaide 61 f. Bronze and magic, G. Germain, Gen'ese del’Od. 1954153!?.

37. R. P. Wykaert, anthropos ix 1914 372; Eliade 38; Nashona, Cline 41.

NOTES 425

38. L. Wiener, Africa and Discovery of America 1922 iii 11 f. Swords, Eliade 28;
Schwartzlose 142; Lippmann (1) 403. China: Kaltenmark 39; Granet (2) 496.

39. Eliade (1) 38; Eisler (1) 115. Mo-ye: Granet (2) 500 f. Other cases, L. Lan-
crotti. East & West vi 1955 106-14 and 316-22; in gen. Kaltenmark (2) 45 ff and
170 ff.

40. Ritual measures in smelting in Africa, esp. continence, Eliade 57 f. Sarat
Chandra Roy, The Bihors 1925 402 ff; F. Dalton descr. ethnol. of Bengal 1872 186 ff. Cr.
Oraons, P. Dehon, Mem. Asiat. Soc. Bengal 1906 121-81 (esp. 128-31); Rahmann
anthropos xxxi 1936 37-96.

41. See ch. xi n. 12.

42. Tran Tam Tinh pi. iv 3; p. 94. Macr. sat. i 20, 18. Suckling, TTT 88 n. 1. B.
de Rachewiltz (1) and M. Lichtheim JNES vi 1947 169-79. Phanos: Athen. xv
699; Schol. Aristoph. lysis. 308.

43. Steph.: T (4) and 46, n. 80; Olymp. AG 75; Zos in Apparatus and Furnaces AG
224, cf Stapleton (4) 40 n. 76. There developed, at least by Arab times a comparison
of upper half of alembic and a cupping-glass, with blood conceived as vehicle of a
man’s spirit; in the top half the vapourised spirit of the mixture collected.

Also Steph., T (4) 43. Irritations: proerethismos, used by Galen (K. xv 622) for a
condition, before disease, that could weaken the body. Place of the male, androka-
thistria, unknown elsewhere. Dip/osis: AG 39, 9. Note that in Chaldean Oracles the
Sources are the Mixing-Bowls in which Eros mixes fire; the Ideas spring from the
Primeval Source, the Paternal Intellect—they are connectives, powers giving form to
matter, and guardians: Lewy (2) 128, 345 f, and 349.

44. Narsai: P. Brouwers 186 f. Ref. is to Genesis i 20. Narsai founded the school
of Nisibis. See also ch. 3 nn. 47-52.

45. Edsman (1) 78 and (3) 107 n. 2.

46. Smalz 56; Edsman (1) 78.

47. SBE xv 175 f, M. Muller. B. Upanishad iv 4, 4.

48. PG xxxiii 1040a.

49. Cf. Dan. vii 10; II Petr, iii 7.

50. Wensinck 25; Wildengren 437 (Syriac).

51. De resurr. i 43, 3 f and ii 20, 8; Edsman (1) 96 f, cf. Aineias of Gaza in our
ch. iii. Potter: Edsman (2) 87 ff. Enchir. xxiii par. 89.

52. Hazlitt iii 201-20; Edsman (1) 104 f. Horse: Edsman 84 ff. In gen. Bolte-
Polivka, Ammerkungen . . . Grimm, ii 149 ff.

53. Edelstein i 220 f; Ail. NA ix 33; fr. Hippys of Rhegion; Halliday (1) 287.

54. Erman (6) 306.

55. Harris mag. pap. 501 = BM 10.042, 4, 9 on = Lexa ii 36-8. The spell starts
“Amun who hide yourself in the pupil of your eye.” Action: “Say on an image of
Amun with 4 faces and a single back, made of clay, the feet of which is the crocodile;
the 8 gods of Khnum on his right and his left sing his praises.” At Abu Simnel Ptah
blesses Ramses II, “I have wrought your limbs of electron, your bones of copper,
your organs of iron,” Forbes (1) ix 62, Embalming: Budge (7) 187 f; G. Maspero.

56. Clem. frag, xxi 3. Thomas: Doresse 234.

57. Tertul. cultufem. pt. i; Jerome virgins profession (Wright, Fathers of the Church
1928, 253); Greg, i 797D, Guignet 253. Cf. Dialogue of the Saviour (Gnostic), Judas
asks, “Why does one live and die.” “And the Lord said, ‘He who is born of the
Truth does not die, he who is born of woman dies.’ ” Adds, “Pray in the place
where there is no woman . . . Destroy the works of femaleness,” Doresse 220 f.

58. Clem, strom. iii 13, 92; Doresse (4) ii 158; James 11. And Doresse ii 157.
Eliade (6) 103-8.

59. Logion 106 (Puech), 103 (Grant); Doresse ii 109 no no, cf. log. 4, 11, 23 P;
3, 10, 24 G. Also John xvii 11, 20-3; Romans xii 4 f; I Cor. xii 27.

60. Grant 144. Jewish trad, in midrasbim: “Adam and Eve were made back to
back, joined at the shoulders; then God divided them with an axe-stroke, cutting

NOTES

427

426

them in half,” Beresbit rabba. Again, “The first man was a man on the left side, a
woman on the right; but God split him in two halves,” Eliade (3) 361. Scot Erigena
cites Maximos Confessor on Christ unifying the sexes in his nature, for in his Resur¬
rection he was “neither man nor woman, though he was born and died a man:”
De div. nat. ii 4, ii 8, 12, 14; J. Evola, I.a metafisico del Sesso, 1938, 180.

61. Hippol. ref. vi 18; and v 6. Eugnostos: Doresse (4) i 211 ff; Eliade (6) 105.
See further Eliade (6) and Delcourt (1) and (2) for many more details.

XIV. AGATHODAIMON

1. AG 268, 3 to 271, 25; MS 2327 f262; Kern orph. fr. 333 (p. 33).

2. AG 115, 7. Attributed: Instruction on the probaphion (substance viewed in
first stage of alloying): Zos., B (1) 193, cf. 212.

3. MS 2327 f202.

4. B (1) 137; Ganschinietz (1) iii 54.

5. Treat, xii 7 f; F (2) i 176 f. Being here is somata, bodies, persons. The noeta
lack quality of individuation. “One is All”: Norden (1) 246-30; Scott-Ferguson iv
152.

6. PGM iv 2987; de is. xx.

7. Wheelwright no 118 (D. fr. 50); cf. W. no 120, “the intelligence by which
are steered all things through all things”—the end there has an alchemical ring.

8. R (1) 127.

9. Kyril. c. JuL ii 5 88ab; R (1) 127 thinks a coll, of aphorisms; W. Kroll denies,
RE viii 800, 51.

10. F (2) iv 135 and i 124 f with 135 n. 78.

11. Ib. iv 137 f. Taxis and anaxeransis go oddly together. For cosmogony cf.
Tim. 30c; R (2) 78; J. Kroll (2) 142, cf. also R (2) 84 n. 3; Scott iv 213 n. 14 and 216
n. 9; Ferguson iv 488.

12. F (2) iv 139.

13. See here ch. iv n. 8; KK 32.

14. Roeder RE x 1832-6; F (2) iii p. clxii.

15 . De principiis 125 quater, i 324, 4 and 6 (Ruelle).

16. Suet. aug. 94; schol. iliad vii p. 147; Athen. iii 83 cites his Egyptian history;
Souda sv Herai'skos.

17. 324, 8 Ruelle.

18. Scott; R (1) 137.

19. Budge (5) 173; for Khnum, JL (3) ch. 4.

20. R (1) 137-44; Zielinski 356-8 against Roeder RE xi 913, 17-27. For Agatho-
daimon of Greek period, Ganschinietz.

21. Euseb. pr. ev. i 10 (41c and 42a): Hopfner fontes 291. BC ii 157 (On) and 271
(7). Khnum with hawk-head: Roscher lex. Kttupbis 1258; veneration of hawk in
Egypt: Hopfner 803 sv accipiter. John Lydos iv 161 (177 Wu.).

22. Derchain (1) 179 no 3. Series: Bonner (1) 56 f; Kopp pal. crit. iv 1829 158
sought meaning in Hebrew “bound with incantations”: HTR xxv 365. N.B.
formula seems only on Khnoubis amulets: Bonner 199 and 57.

23. Hypostasis: Edfu vi 185, 3; Khnum-Nph vi 327, 11.

24. Kees (2) 437.

25. Derchain (1) 181 no 6. Snakegods and earth: Derchain (2) no 233, Manethos:
Loeb ed. 15 (fr. 3, Synk., 32).

26. Derchain(2) 188 no 16. Birth: Bonnet, Keallex. 520. Womb in gen.: Derchain
(2); Strieker i 45 ff. Lion-headed snake: Bonner (1) 34 ff and Delatte, Mus. Beige xviii
1914 69 ff.

27. B (1) 332; Berl. pap. i 27, 236. Lex.: MS 2327 f2o; B (1) 32.

28. Bonner (1) 53; Galen simples x 19 (K. xii 207); Aetios, tetr. i 2, 36. Lion¬

headed type: Drexler in Roscher. Marcellus Empir. 20, 98, lapidary of Sok. and
Dionysios (Ruelle ii 177, n cf. 12) etc.: generally recommend use of jasper or
onyx.

29. Ruelle (1); Bonner (1) 54 f.

30. 32, 26; 33, 22-4 (Engelbrecht). And 54, 11.

31. Mely-Ruelle ii 177. Hephaistion puts under Crab.

32. Bonner (1) 55-9; stone and colour, 39 f. Vowels: Budge (1) 204. Proklos:
King 223. Womb: Matter, pi. iiC, 4.

33. BM stone 56260; see HTR xxv 365-7 and JEA 1933 192. Ethiopia: Gardiner
JEA xiv 1928 10 and E. Cerulli Eiiopi in Palestina 1943 i 125. Holy water: JL (5)
ch. xvii, also 286 f and 100. Thoth: Erman (6) 306 = Pap. Sallier i 8, 2 ff.

34. Badaw i 13. Khnum-Chnoub: Sauneron Esna 1963 90 n. 6. PGM iv 1635 ff;
Derchain (2) 57.

35. Drexler denies the relation.

36. Bonner (1) 25; Budge (1) 204 and (2) 14, compares to snake and staff of
Asklepios, which he says was taken from Sumerians, and compares Num. xxi 9.
For argument “via astrology into magic”: Delatte (2) 56. Sign: ibid, connected
with dekan knm. Drexler links with the design in astronomic texts at Edfu and
Dendera; name of dekan Knm 1264—also Brugsch thes. 18.

37. Sethe (2) 4. Iambi, de mysi. viii 2 f; Porph. (Euseb. pr. ev. ii 45 f). Delatte (2)
56. The terrifying aspect of the first dekan of the Lion no doubt came from Kneph.

38. PGM iv 1598; R (1) 28 f. .

39. PGM iv 939. Psois: Tarn (1); Weber 42 ff; Roussel (2) 91; Ganschinietz.
Tyche: Oxy. xi 1380; Roussell no 119. Thermoutheis: Ailian NH x 31. Ptol. I:
Arrian anab. iii 3, 5; Tarn CAH vi 378 n.

40. Bonner (1) 205. Crum Coptic diet. 462a; 5443b.

41. Bonner 205. .

42. Bonner 162; Perdrizet (1) for inscr. Thermouthis later identified with Isis.
See two more stones, Bonner 163 f and 204 f. Delatte-Derchain no 223, Sarapis-
Agathodaimon; 285 as ? Aion Ploutodotes, cf. 437 etc. Glykon: ib. pp 67-72 and
nos. 81-4 with ref. to cult founded by Alexandros of Abonouteichos, 2nd c. Another
assimilation of the dekan: Junker, Onurisleg. 42 ff: three inscriptions. Derchain (2)
no 190 for ibis connected with lion-headed snake.

43. Eye: Delatte (2) 72 f (no 89 bis). Giants: Bonner (1) 168 f.

44. Stapleton (4); for Table, 24. He goes into the question of magic squares etc.,
which I omit. Harran’s site: Seton Lloyd, Early Anatolia 9.

45. Stapleton, app. B.

46. Refs, in notes, Stapleton 40-3. For marble: here. ch. xi n. 17. Steph.: T (4)
43 and 45 ; Holymard (8) 426. Gums: here. ch. ix n. 5 2 : heat, ch. ix n. 76. Chrysokolla :
ch. ix n. 62 and F (1) 142; AG 272, 4. Sun and dew: AG 45, 22V; 155, b, 10; Zos.,

11 47. Granet (2) 234; Stapleton (4) 19 n. 33 (for azure instead of green). Little Key ,
lost, is mentioned by Christian: AG 281, 18 f, evidently dealt with purple stones (in
one”place identified with iochalkos, so may be cuprous oxide).

48. Stapleton (4) 43 n. Komarios: here, ch. ix nn. 53 and 64: see Stephanos in
T (4) 39 and 46 n. 82.

49. Jamasp: Stapleton (4) 26; 28 f—on Demok. 29. See list 30 f.

50. Stapleton (4) 26-9.

51. T (5) 41; 43 n 99. No 41 not sure; Ideler etc: T (5) nn, 101 and 122. Copper:
see also Browne (1) 210.

52. Lippmann (3) 21 with (1) i 224 and ii 107, citing Brandenstein RE Suppl. vi
181.

42B

NOTES

XV. ZOSIMOS

1. Phot. cod. XX clxx; MS 2327 f 2 o 3 v; B (1) 177-87; Syriac, B (3) iii 210-68 and
197-308. His 28 Books: R (1) 266 f; the Christian, Riess RE i 1348, 30; F (7) 75.
List of works: T (2) 119 f, also Gundel (3) 246 f and 252 f. Date: Riess RE i 1348.

2. Africanus: see here ch. x n. 24. Phot. cod. xxxiv; Euseb. HE vi 23 and l 7
(extracts) Gep. Needham 1781 p. xlii; Fabric, iv 240, etc.

3. AG 234 f; Ruska (2) 30 f (he points out it is not in Furnaces ); MS 2249 {g4v-
102, also Mark fi86 for variants; AG 236-8; F (1) i 273 f. B (3) i 22.

4. B (1) 181; 2327 f8, cf. fio6 and 149; f230, “what men write, the gods are
jealous of.” Stone: 2249 fio and 2327 f8, with Mark f85V.

5. Here ch. iii n. 21. The Souda calls him Alexandrian. He may well have spent
some time in the capital.

6. Cf. CCAG iv 146 (each sign related to 2 letters): Boll (1) 469 ff. Dornseiff 25;
Etym. Mag. 294, 29.

7. R (1) 267; AG 228, 7-11. R (1) 102-6; AG 229, 10 to 233); BC ii 243; AG
229, 11-20 etc. BC ii 245 n. 1; Scott iv 105-110.

Nikotheos: Porph. v. plot. 16; Scott iv 116 f; R (1) 267 f; C. Schmidt TU (NF)
v 4, 58 ff; Baynes 84 f n. 7; Homer, II. xiv 201-46. Divine water: cf. CMAG viii p.
2 no 5 3; AG iii 8 n. 2; Lippmann (1) i 8 and index theion hydor. But Omega is also one
of signs of lead and of Kronos to whom lead belongs; AG 8, 13. Timely tinctures:
F (1) i 264 n. 10; Ruska (2) 22 f. Procession, cf. CH ( Kra/er ) iv 7.

8. BC ii 243 ff; F (14). Katarchai: Bouch6-L. chapters xiii-xiv, esp. 475-9; Sarapion
in Cod. Flor. 99 etc.

9. Puech 145 and 151; Bruce cod. pt. 2; Doresse 86, 155 f, 313, 115; Plot. enn.
ii 9; Porph. v.plot. Rapt: Ep. to Corinthians xii 2-4. Nikotheos and fall of primitive
man: Bousset (3) 186 ff and R (2) 45 ff with rel. to enn. ii 9; BC ii 245 n. 5.

10. Stress against astrologic determination: BC ii 244 n. 3; Kroll (3) and (5);
Arnob. adv. not. ii; RE sv Heimarmene, 2640; R (3) 301; Cumont (12) 4th ed. 107
and 291 ff. Orientalising Hermetics with ascetic ways: Brauninger 33; rel. to Stoics,
RE sv Alchim. 1347* 2 4 * BC ii 284 f: Heptaphthongos , and prayers, loud, murmured,
mute. Oriental gods v. Fate, eg. Isis, Peek 123 line 55.

11. Iambi, de myst. viii 7 f. For Bithos of Dyrrachium, Bitys, and Pitys the
Thessalian: Kroll (6) 156 n. 2. F (7) 77; BC ii 308 = PGM i 135 no iv, 200: Pi/yos
agoge (? Bitys): R (1) 108 n. 2 and 107 n. 1; Hopfner (1) ii par. 367 ff.

12. Hippol. ref. v 7. Iranian primal man: Bousset (3) 215 ff; R (7); Cumont HRH
1936 39 n. 2.

1 i- Olymp. AG 89, 3; Jos. ant. i 1, 2; Euseb. pr. ev. xi. 6, 10; Scott iv 121.

14. Thus: “To Adam is joined Jesus Christ [who] transported [him] there when
he lived before those who are called photes. And he appears still to men totally
impotent like a man born vulnerable and stricken with rods, and in secret he takes
away the photes that were his, considering that he does not suffer in any way but
shows how one treads death underfoot and makes nothing of it.” Adam: “whom
they have struck down and put to death.” “They kill their own Adam.” ( Photes :
poetical for “men, mortals.”)

15. Antitheos-. Cumont (12) 278 n. 49. Chiliasm: Wikenhauser. BC i 219 f; Boll-
Bezold etc. Sternglauhe (4th ed.) 200—5> Cumont (10) 93 ff. Monogenes comes: Scott
iv 132; Ruska. Prometheus as intellect: Plout. de fort. 98c; Synk. chron. 282 (Dind).
citing Platon, comedian, Sophistes, i 136 Koch. Allegory: J. Galenos, Allegor.
Mesiod\ Gaisford, Poetae Gr. Min. ii 1823 580. F. suggests among Hermetic works,
CH iv and i. For Fate: I Cor. i 12 and iii 4. Ears, cf. Math, xi 15; xiii 9, also 16 and’
19. Antimimos-. Doresse 297, those of two souls in Dead Sea sect. The passage on
poverty also in Hook of Sophe; and Synesios attributes it to Demok., AG 59, 6, cf.
211, 9.

16. F (1) i 273 f; Ruska (2) 30-2.

NOTES 4 2 9

17. AG 239 ff; F (1) i 275 ff with R (1) 214 n.i; Scott iv iii f and 136-44; Ruska
(2) 18-23. F 275 n. 2 on title; also 262 n. 1.

18. Title: OGI 100, 2; Cumont (1) 34 n. 3. Prophets: Cumont (1) 119 n. 5.

19. KK CH xxiii 67 f.

20. F (1) i 278 n. 4 on epitaph of Akmonia (Mon. Asiae Min. Ant. vi 335 no 315)
on opening a katheton (prob. Jewish term), suggesting “a lair beneath the surface
or the floor of a heroon.”

zi. De myst. viii 3. Terrestrial demons: Prokl. in kratyl. 69, 4; CCAG viii 4, 252,
11; Wolff, Porphyridephil. exorac. haur. 1856 112 n. 5. Porph. deabst. ii 36, 42; Aug.
civ. dei xi’19; Cumont (12) 296; Tert. apol. xxii 6; Hopfner (1) i par 224 (index
Nahrung ); Min. Felix oct. xxvi; Cyprian quod idola vi.

22. Apokatastasis-. restoration, re-establishment. I take it to mean a completion
of the cycle, a return, a new start.

23. Blemmyes: Strab. xvii 1, 2 (786); Chron. pasch. (504 f Bonn) for 253; Firmus
SHA iii 3 and Aurel. xxxiii 4, Probus xvii 2 f; Zos. (hist.) i 71, 4. Ostraka: Preaux
actesvii congres int. de pap. 1952 Mus. Helved. xi953 2i8n. 79. Blemmyes: J. Maspero
286-8; prem. on the wars (considered late 4th c. or early 5th): Schubart-Wilam.,
Perl. Kl. texte v 1. 1907 108; Draeseke, Ph. Woch. xxxiii 1915 15; Schmid-Stah. ii 2,
959: a Homeric imitation; cf. poem, Vitelli At. e Kama vi 1903 149 5 Comparetti,
Pap. Fiorent. no 114; Loeb Sel. pap. iii nos 142-3. Why not date them c. 300, or at
least the first poem? Also, Preaux, Mus. helvet. x 1953 218; Oxy. 1194. Discoveries of
Emery at Qustul Balliana have shown the B.’s wealth from the 3rd c., including
many Alexandrian artworks—result of raids?

24. AG 190 f. Principles; Stoicheia.

25. F (1) i 280 n. 4. Iambres: ch. ix here n. 31. Also R (1) 214 n. 1. Solomon’s
treatises on magic: CCAG vii 2, 143-65; Harl. 5596 (Anec. gr. 397 ff); Testament of
S. 3 MacCown; Paris 2419 (Anec. gr. 470 ff); also Anec. gr. 649 ff; B (3) ii 264-6.
About 1000 b.c. the so-called Solomon’s Seal was in Palestine the symbol of a
planetary god (Kronos): Stapleton (4) 25 n; Lewy in Hro^ny Fest. iv 1950 (Prague).
See ch. xvi n. 9 here.

26. CH i and iv; here, ch.ixn. 31. Your Perfection, teleiotes: R (Hist, mon.) 109 n.5.

27. “Corrupting”: sepasthai, rot, moulder, decompose (wood), mortify (flesh),
promote formation of a laudable pus (medical); also used of food rejected after
digestion (Arist. met. 381b 12).

28. Note how Zosimos’ “question” has a Taoist note.

XVI. MORE ON ZOSIMOS

1. MS 2327 fi68v-i77; AG 107-12, 115-18. Translation based on T (4).

2. Shat apatha—B., i 9, 2, 21; cauldron of renewal: JL (5).

3. Eliade (6) 171 and 153-6; Kausitaki B. iii 8; Ait. B. ii 40, 1-7; Satapatha B.
vi 1, 2, 12. “With his joints unstrung he was incapable of standing up, and the gods
put them together again by means of sacrifices,” Sat. B. i 6, 3, 35 f; the priest
repeats the creation, “he reunited Prajapati totally and entirely,” Sat. B. vi 2, 2, 11.
Heesterman (1) 7, 61, 17 ff, 67; sacrifice as universe, 10, 29 etc.; union of male and
female waters 86 ff; marriage with the people 52 ff; purification of waters by gold
87; Hocart 189 ff. Navel: Auboyer 79 ff; Gonda 84 ff; Eliade (7) 27-56. Chalkos:
Jeanmaire, RA 1956 xlviii 30

4. Forbes (1) iii 15 f.

5. Butler 81; Palmer and More 16.

6. Dickie. I owe Prof. Dickie thanks for bringing this item to my notice. Sarcolla:
Diosk. ii 281; iii 329, resin of a tree of Persia, bitter and malodorous. Verses:
Qur’an xliv 10 f.

7. B (1) 236 f.

43°

NOTES

8. Budge (3).

9. Olymp. 2327 fzio; Mark H74V. Mercury: 2327 £95. Osiris as lead and sulphur:
Steph. 2327 f 21. Tomb of O. in magic conjurations: Leemans 1939 (1st issue) 7.
In gen., T (1) 54. Assyrians and Babs. named lead Anu after the skygod with some
likeness to Kronos.

10. See ch. vii n. 30; Stapleton (4) 34 and 40. Zos. knew Ag.’s work: Stapleton
26. Sal ammonia known to Assyrian cuneiform texts: C. Thompson (2) 12; Parting¬
ton (1) 147, 317; Stapleton 34 n. 68; Lippmann (1) iii 116. It seems used first in
Iranian alchemy in Sassanid times; thence to Chinese, Indian, Arab, and Greek
alchemy: Ruska (10) and (11). Arab nusjadir is from Iranian noshadqr-. Corbin 53
n. 15. Stapleton tries (6), cf. (8), to show Iranian noshadar and Sanskrit tiavasara are
from Chinese mu-sha. This is incorrect: Laufer (3) 505; Eliade (1) 194 f.

xi. Many more small points about Zos. might be followed out; but I do not
want my main points to be blurred by discussing small obscure interpretations,
substances etc., though further details come up in c. xvii.

For Zos. the Theban and On the Letter Kappa, see B (3); Scott 1936 iv 140 and
143; Doresse 278.

XVII. THE LATER GREEK ALCHEMISTS

1. C. Cels, iii 59; I Cor. ii 6, 7; Mark iv 34; Matth. x 26 f; W. B. Smith 34-45.

2. Gavin 70 with refs.; Lietzmann 235; Volker 136. Power: Lietzmann 107 and
235 ff; Gavin 93 and 77; Did. X4; Ps.ixi 12; Wisd. xi 24. Immortality in this context:
Sarapion anaphora 13:15; Lietzmann 76; Gallic liturgy ih. 96; Berl. pap. ib. 257 n. 2,
cf. 235, 257; in general Volker 106 f.

Cf. Egyptian coronation rite: Smith pap. xxi, 9; xxii, 7-10; xx 1, 3-8; Breasted
(3) 482 and V. Loret.

3. Greg. Naz 1,1020a; 2, 328c, cf. 2, 440a; i, 757c. Also Euseb. HE 853a. Sublime
medicine: Greg. 2, 549b; Guignet 146.

4. MS 2327 f222; Mark f 62V. Pelag. is cited by Olymp.

5. Areometer: Glover 323 f. Dreams: I285ab; Lacombrade 152: Dion 1 69.
Demok. only cited once, banally, in his work: Lacambrade 70 n. 32. Hymn: ii
59 ff. Indeed Synesios shows much the same sort of exalted vague antitheses as
Stephanos. Hymns i 191 ff, “You are the child produced, you are the unbegotten ...
You are the displayed, you are the hidden,” etc.; ii 80 ff, “I hymn you blessed one
by voice and by silence,” v 63, “you are father you are mother you are husband you
are wife . . .” Synesios and Chaldeans: Lewy (2) 73, and his Egyptian myth, 305 ff;
Syn. on daimons and on pneuma as psyche phantastike. Lacombrade 166 f.

6. AG 63 and 65 etc; MS 2327 £31; T(2) 120; AG 56.

7. Souida: Androkleides; Lacombrade 71 035.

8. B(i) 254ff; Mark f i66v; B(i) 193; AG 69; F(i) i 281; T(z) i2of; MS 2327
fi97; Hoefer i 273. Abundance of Ocean: see JL (5) 104L

9. Arche as beginning or origin in Homer and Hdt.; as principle in Anaximan-
dros, acc. to Simplik. in ph. 150, 23.

10. Earth is here considered as one of the four elements, as an arche.

11. Here he slips into conventional tribute to “theologians,” but the whole bias
of his formulations as of those of Zos. is to pantheism, god as the formative and
active aspect of matter or process. For Unmoved Movers in Aristotle: metaph. ch.
8 (1073b 3 ff); Lloyd (2) 147-53. F° r materialism of Stoics: Merlan(2) 1246;.
materialist trends in Theophrastos, iii.

12. Muses: 2250 £69; oracles 2327 f2io; Isis, 2327 £219; gold 2250, fi23, cf
Plin. xi 21 and xxxii 4, 21; Solin. xxx; Philost. VAT v 1; Hdt. iii 102. His Gnostic
speculations seem from Zos. For the Arts and gold, note Kallimachos’ Iambi xii 58-9
(Loeb): winged ants.

NOTES

431

13. Kings: 2327 faofi; see also 207 f. Months: B (1) 195; * 3*7 f2 ° 6 -
14 MS 2327 f 199; Mark H65; B (1)194-

it Kopt cod. liv pub. by Zoega 100 f; spell, L. and L. spellbook xxu (2), v 15,
Lexa ii 144. In gen. Revillout RHR viii (4ths.) 146, 43 L 434 For Dioskoroi. see
j. Maspero, index: Dioscores.

16 Mart Ram. Vet. Adonis, Usuardi; patriarch. Cal. Btbtop.

17 F (7) 78 ff for detailed investigation. I see no reason to doubt the traditon
that Kallihikos of Heliopolis played a crucial part in developing Greek Fire
Partingdon (1) 13 thinks it prob. that chemists in Byz. devised it; but we have no
evidence of such groups there while it is clear there was much alchemical activity

in i S 8 yr B (1) 202-5; AG 395 , 399 ; H 405 , 407 , 409 f, 4 X 4 f- T (z) 1*1. MS 2,27
f 9 2 on; 2249 f6; Mark fioi, no etc. Cited in Kitab. Citations. 2327 fioo, 95, 9 ,

fl °i 3 Q V, S f mph- Kmmbacher 621, holds alchemic works to be late; Usenet too, 1879
and^i88o (de Steph. Alex.); Kind thinks the alchemists to be 9th c.: Lippmann (1) 11
204. Usenet thinks Steph! could not have lectured publicly on alchemy, but this

W Fabri C th vi 4 ch 7’; ^694, identified with Stephanos of Athens who left medical
works one the seven compilers who coll, works of Galen in 16 books; also
Bussemaker and Dietz {schol. in Hippoc. et Galen, i 1, pref. xi^ But the argumentis not
strong Stephanos in middle ages in Allegoriae Sapientmm(B,bl. Chen. 1 47 2 *),-
opuscule where Herakles (? Heraklios) addresses Steph. of Alexandria. Alex, schools
survived Arab conquest till c. 700: M. Meyerhof, Vm AUex nach ^g^?£ ctan tz

20. Pizzamente, Latin paraphrase 1573 ;T (4) Ideler 11199 53 , ( )> g

CMAG ii 338, with letter to Theodores interpolated between 2nd and 3rd lecture .

T l a) 46 n 72 I make much use of Taylor’s version. . .

if. Fireless sulphur: theion apyron, used for sulphur, but Zos. mentions a whitenmg
agem 7 orpiment. Becoming like Ocean: Ohani Z ousa. Petfectton (° f ou 1 )T .
translates exaryisma as appendix. Gold-roofed: ? chrysorrhophon-. lizz. has.O aun
fluens caelestis fons. Gold curls: chrys^omion bostrychon; 4 >izz has’ caesam '

22. T (4); MS 2327 fi22; B (1) 228 f. Released by death, apothanatose.

*4. Sote 55 i! n e d agle-stone had two sexes (Plin. xxxvi 149-51 1 AJ 1 . NA i 35;
Diosk V 160; Solin. xxxvii (Momm. 159, 9); BC 11 zoo-7 and x 95 , >3 >

Damigeron i 3 z 4 and 163 (Pitta, Spicil. Solesm.); aids pregnancies and births, has

p<~b, y r *. e

fBadev 268V Steph. probably uses it as equiv. to Moonstone; not in other alchem.

^GoldfoXrecipe of bemok. (AG 44, 4 ); its making (AG 56, 16); seems a
pigment or coral-like ornamental material. Lapis corallus BC 11 199, ^ power
S lightning, typhones (?) and water-snakes: Damig. ch vii; also fertil ty-
S against wtdTOuranos-sign: T (4) 46 n. 85; Zmetti ^ f signs 1267; 130)-
Fmnerors• T (2) 122 n. 7. Two stones, 2 vapours: Stapleton (5) 83, 881,90. Fo
Pythag. idea of One embracing Odd and Even: Aristot. met. A 5 , 986a 15 ff; hnk with
male and female, 986a 23 ff; F (1) iv 48 f.

26 Anon: 2317 fx62; Mark £78; AG 421, 424, 433. _ f

27 . T (2) izf Pappos, AG 27 {orkns); Salmanes 864; Psellos, MS 2328 fio,
1027 f52 2327 fi, CMAG vi; Nikephoros AG 452; Lexikon AG 4.

28 Browne (1) (2) (3). I use his translation as basis. Ideler 11; Fabric, v 79 7 -

R. and GoTdsmidi propose HeHodoros as author of all the poems. His work is ded.
m Theodosios the Great King. On style: R (9) and Browne (3) 15-87.

Ruska takes Djabir b. Haiyan as founder of Moslem alchemy; see also Haschmi

etc.

432

NOTES

XIX: CONCLUSIONS

!• Dion xii 33 f; vii 31, cf. Plout. de tranq. xx; Cic. leg. ii 11; Phil. spec, i 66 etc.
Idea of maths, (and star-contemplation) as initiation: 'Epinom. 986b-8d4. Sen. QN
vii 31.

2. Toulmin, Listener Feb. 11 i960 & Philosophy of Sc. 1953.

3 * A. C. Crombie discovery (Aug. 1962) 24. on Aristotelian law of motion giving
the proportional relation of velocity to force or power of the moving agent; this
could not explain a projectile’s velocity after it left the agent of propulsion or what
increase in power occurred to make a heavy body accelerate as it fell. See A. Lejeune
for virtues and limits of ancient method, esp. 184—6. Carrucio for struggle of the
Greeks towards the integral calculus.

4. Bernal 238 f. Science in History 1954. Philoponos: Sheldon-Williams 477 if, with
refs.

5. Nat. Fac. ii 3 (82).

6. Weight: Browne (1) 211.

7. Lloyd on Plato and esp. relation to medical science. Medicine needed to refer
to practice and actual cases, but did not attempt to re-create phenomena under
tested conditions. With the new dynamical concepts of the Stoics we feel that men
could have got past the geometrical outlook of Plato; but the “swerve” of Epikouros
(introduced into the atoms for moral reasons) seems the only addition made. See
Sambursky (1) 70 if on Impetus; Hipparchos and storage of power, 71, 74. Note
how Philoponos links his concept of Impetus with colour-tincting. “Indeed, we can
see from the colours which stain corporeal bodies exposed to them, that certain
forces of an incorporeal form are emitted when the sun’s rays pass through a
transparent coloured object... It is thus evident that certain forces can reach bodies
in an incorporeal way from other bodies.” Phys. 642, 9.

8. See my Sunset Ship and Lives of Turner and Cezanne. 1650-80: J. Ferguson,
/. of the Alchemical Soc. 1914 ii 5.

9. Whyte, Unitary Principle in Physics and Biology 1949, 15 f.

10. As I type this last chapter, I note the comment by E. H. Hutton (New Scientist
21 Dec. 1967, “The investigation of elementary particles lies outside the scope of
quantum mechanics. It has more resemblance to the ways in which the internal
structure of living cells is revealed. Comparison between physics and biology, at
the present stage of development, should be useful. It may help us in constructing a
new model for the elementary particle, just as previously we learned a new meaning
for ‘atomicity’ through quantum mechanics, going beyond the simple concept of
chemical atom.”

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Index

I. GODS

Abraxas 264b, 406; Agathodaimon 71, 221, 265: see also Index III; Agdastis 82;
Ahura Mazda 26, 138; Aion 242, 262-6, 271, 276, 286, 302; Amun 424b Ammon
209, 287; Anaitis 134b 138; Anna Perenna 422b Anu 216; Anoubis 159, 172,
176, 195, 262, 307, 411, 413; Anteros 53; Anu 216; Aphrodite 35, 42, 1x5, 1196,
156 (Tryphi), 265, 284, 375, 401, 406; Apis 70, 218, 302; Apollo 26, 53, 71, 96, 99,
160, 170, 191b 265, 279, 366, 409; Asklepios 99, 159b 163, 176, 203, 206, 208,
253, 271, 285, 296, 302, 306, 329, 358, 404, 4x3b 421, 427; Ares 35, 66, 156, 284;
Athena 25, 81, 139, 162, 221, 281; Attis 79, 82, 178, 271, 405; Atum 118, 171,

275, 422-

Baal 138; Baltis 146; Bel 138; Belf 171; Boel 170, 412.

Chesnu 419; Chnoubis 262, 304-10, 312, 413, 426f; Chnoumis 306, 309, 3x3;
Circe 53, 425.

Daktyis 79, 83; Demeter 8of, 401; Dikaiosyne 77; Dionysos 79, 8xf, 15;, 198, 200,
401.

Ea 216; Eatthmother 79, 81; Enlil 216; Ernutet 311; Eros 53, 115, 119-21, 421.
Ganymede 375; Geb 274.

Hades 37, 136; Hapi 201; Harpokrates 262, 312; Hathor 274; Hebe 375; Hckatc
136b 266, 416, 424; Helios 42, 264, see Smr, Hephaistos 25, 39, 69, 139, 270,
281b 3x0; Hera 81, 112, 401; Herakles, Hercules, 132; Hermes 33, 35, 37b 42,
65, 72, 77, 80, 90, 108, 156b 195, 209, 271, 273, 284, 3x2; Heron 172, 182, 196,
413; Horos 39, 43, 53, 66, 71, 166, 172, 182, 202b 282, 288, 298, 312, 413.

laldabaoth 273; lao Sabaoth 264, 310, 312, 406; Imhotep 163b 416; Ishtar 147;
Isis 39, 42, 71, 141, 170b 262, 265, 269, 288, 305, 307, 3x7, 361, 366, 426.

Janus 267; Julian 37b 56, 240, 269; Jupiter 60.

Kabeiroi 78b 80, 82b 199, 321, 4x5; Kampehis 71, 303, 305-9, 313; Kamutef 303f;
Kautes, Kautopates 200; Khepri i9of; Khnum 25, 304b 309, 313, 422, 425-10;
Khonsu 163; Kmeph 311, 313; Kneph 71, 304b 308b 427; Kore 75, 8if, 263;
Korybantes 78b 83, 331; “Kothos” 367-70; Kronos 35, 39, 156, 209, 265, 282,
284, 314, 325, 356, 429; Kybele 82, 401.

Lakshmi xoi.

INDEX

443

Mandoulis 404; Marduk 216, 395; Mars 60, 146; Mercury 35, 37, 60, 169, 193, 267,
271, 371; Mesekhent 2j; Min 209, 303; Mithras 34-7, 60, 169, 193, 267, 271, 371,
see Mithraism (Index VII); Mnevis 70, 209, 416.

Nana 82; Neith 290; Nephthys 170, 235, 305; Nun 172, 286!'; Nut 174, 355, 423.

Omanos 138; Ophiouchos 272; Ormuzd 35; Osiris 3, 42, 50, 162!, i7if, 176, I 97 f»
209, 22 7 f, 250, 262, 265, 273, 28if, 288, 298, 300-3, 310, 314, 321, 356, 366, 422I,
430; Ouranos 39.

Pan 209; Persephone 37, 406; Pluto 37; Proserpine 37; Psais (Psoi) 196, 311!;
Pysche 115, 119-21, 266, 401, 406; Ptah 27, 39, 139, 176, 2i6f, 282, 297, 310
(Phta), 424L

Re 163, 172, 174, 269, 273, 298, 303, 412; Rhea 401.

Sarapis, 90, 199, 227!, 262, 311, 330, 360, 367, 4x1, 4 J 4 - 5 ; Saturn 60, 146, 153;
Serquet 357, 423; Seshat 168; Seth 242, 282; Shu 286f, 297; Simi 409; Sin 314!;
Singe-Bonga 292; Sito 273; Souchos 265.

Tat 160, 168, 170, 173, 241, 287, 301; Teos 163!; Thermouthis 269, 31 if; Thocris
139, 221, 223, 262; Thoth 65, 72, 151, 157, 159-66, i68f, 170-2, 174, l 91 > 2 I 7 .
273, 297, 307, 312, 331, 400, 4*2f, 416; Tiamat 290; i yche 77 ^, 1 65f5 262, 265,
3iif; Typhon 69, 194, 242, 282.

Venus 60.

Zervan 139; Zeus 26, 35, 39, 69, 112, 136, 209, 282-4, 311, 327, 33if; Zoroaster 2(1.

(As god-figures such as Hermes, Agathodaimon, Isis, etc., merge with alchemic
characters, add to the above the names in Index III.)

II. RULERS

Akhenaten 215, 307; Alexander the Great 20, 41, I3if, 136, 185, 270, 312, 327, 409,
412; Amasis 165; Amenhotep 39, 163; Ammon 330; Anastasios 64, 146,
Artaxerxes 134, 136; Assurbanipal 290; Augustus 123, 200; Aurelian 56, 339.

Caligula 29, 67, 146, 395; Caracalia 272; Chosroes 377; Claudius 101; Constantine
the Great 54-6; Constantius 54.

Dareios, 134, 165, 412; Decius 367; Diocletian 54, 336, 400.

Elegabal 324.

Galienus 185.

Hadrian 77; Hammurabi 25, 280; Hatshepsut 234; Heraklios 376-8, 431; Honorius
361.

Kassandros 409; Kheops 24, 72, 202; Kleopatra 41, 168, 253; Kroisos 213; Kyros
134, 138.

Nero 29, 20^f, 404; Numa 109.

Osorkon II, 188-91.

Philip 77; Probus 339; Psammetikos 40; Ptolemy I, 227, 312; II, 168; IV, i66f;
VII, 96; IX, 163.

Ramses II, 46, 297, 425; VI 190.

Sesostris 227; Sheba, Queen of, 109, 185; Solomon 106, 109, 185, 241, 340, 429.
Tiberius 92, 133; Tutankhamen 273.

Valens 54; Valentinian I, 54; Vespasian 106.

Xerxes 39, 13 if, 136.

HI. ALCHEMISTS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND OTHER ANCIENT AUTHORS

Aelius Promotus 404; Aetios 134, 253, 408; Africanus, Jul., 84, 202f, 323^ 403;
Agathodaimon 42, 62, 121, 151, 159, 168, 173, 178, 184, 196, 244, 3oiff, 304, 355,
357, 362, 366, 371, 4i2f, 416, 422, 426f; Agatharkides 59, 215, 415; Ailian 32,
297; Aeineias 62f, 570, 425; Aischylos 282; Alexandras (on Stone) 66; Alexandras
of Abonoteichos 25, 427; Alexandros of Libya 329; Alkiphron 68; Ambrose 64;
Ammonianus, Marcel., 53; Anaxagoras 6; Anaxilaos 99, 123, 126, 403; Anaxi¬
menes 365, 395; Androkleides 361; Anon 374, 378, 420; Antisthenes 95; Apion
170, 396; Apollobex 96, io6f, 131; Apollodoros 403; Apolionios of Rhodes 84;
Apollonios of Tyana 42, 106, 184, 219, 297, 414; Apsyrtos 404; Apuleius 107,
120, 133, 201, 293; Aratos 91, 371; Archelaos 379; Archimedes 7, 11, 96, 383;
Ares 66; Aristeides 159, 323; Aristophanes 33, 80, 397; Artemidoros 267, 269;
Aristotle 4, 6, 9, 11, 16, 20, 22, 48-50, 6j(, 9of, 93, iiff, 127, 136, 245, 280, 282,
363^ 383-6, 392-4, 402; “Aristotle” i44f, 404; Arnobius 134; Asklepiades 99;
Athenaios 237, 424-6; Augustine 168, 296; Aurelius, M., 39.

Balinas (Belben) 4if, 106, 185, 404f, 414; Bardasanes 396, 415; Basil, St. 139;
Bitos (Bitys) 330, 337, 428; Bolos 22, 31, 44, 66, 84, 9off, nof, 131-5, 138f, i4of,
i56f, 236, 243, 251, 321.

Celsus 34, 401; Christian, The, 104, 175, 37if, 404, 427; Chrysippos 10, 2if, 283;
Chymes 66, 68, 240, 366, 412; Cicero 10; Claudian 267^ 422; Clement 78, 82,
93, 169^ 200, 227, 417; Columella 31, 66, 91, 96, 396.

Damaslcios 83, 303; Damigeron 107, 131, I33f, 408; Dardanos 39, 106, 118-21,
131, 405; Demetrios Phalareus I26f; Demolcritos 1, 4, 6, 10-12, 14, 30-2, 39,
65f, 84, goff, noff, 131-4, i4of, 15x, 156-8, 174, 177, 182-4, 189, 196, 202, 243,
245 f> 251, 318, 320f, 335f, 343, 356, 361, 363, 371, 375, 379, 390, 394, 396, 402-5,
407, 409, 43of; Demostratos 329; Diodoros 39, 47f, 59, i62f, 167, 170; Dion
Chrysostom j82f; Dion Kassios 200; Diogenes of Bab. 283; of Apollonia 6;
Diogenes Laertes 92, 95, 116, 125^ 131, 284; Diolcles 401; Dionysios Areop. 62:
of Halik. 129: of Miletos 134: see also Sokrates ; Dioskoros 66, 141, 360, 567;
Dioskotides 28f, 60, 66, 83, 126, 133, 245, 278, 401, 403, 416, 429; Dorotheus 396.

Empedokles 2f, 5f, 93, 129, 407; Ennius 33; Enoch 173, see Henoch (Index V) and
Book of E. (Index IV); Ephraim 285; Epikouros 95, cf. 141, 365, 432; Epiktetos
33; Epiphanes 418; Erathosthenes 96; Eudemos 136; Eudoxos 407; Euhemeros
39; Eunapios 53; Eusebios (aich.) 118: (hist.) 54, 64, 91, 202, 323, 406.

445

444 INDEX

Flaccus Africus 41; Firmicus Matemus 33, 39, 60, 175, 396.

Galen 21, 75, 162, 185, 204, 306, 378, 408, 414, 425, 431; Galienus 414; Gellius, A.,
1x5, 124; George Synkellos 43, 54, 63, 68, 168, 196, 323, 405; Gnostics 19, 3Hi,
43, 52, 38, 104, 127?, 134, 192, 202, 224 (Boborian), 225, 232, 243, 272, 285-7,
301, 323, 328, 333, 343, 355, 358f, 371, 405, 411, 414, 416, 422; Gregorios 72;
Gregory Naz. 64, 299.

Harpokration 4of, 180, 413; Heliodoros 379; Hephaistion 272, 306, 309; Hera-
kleides 136, 403, 407; Herakleitos 2, 34, 8of, 90, i35f, 144, 364, 423; Heron 416;
Hermes Trismegistos 4if, 65b 109, 113b 147, 151, 155b 189!!, i86f, 196-8, 230,
254, 301-4, 306, 309, 314-8, 32of, 325-8, 33of, 335-7, 341, 360!', 366, 405, 411-4,
see Hermes (Index I) etc.; Hermetics 5, 23, 37f, 40, 43, 72, 109, 135, 160, 173-5,
179, 189, I97f, 241, 285, 294, 302, 323, 335, 341, 428; Hermippos 157, 411;
Hermodoros 136; Herodotos 15, 70, 131, 134; Hesiod 26f, 69, 283, 327b 331,
334, 371, 393; Hesychios 170, 331; Hierotheos 379; Hipparchos 383!, 432;
Hippokrates 5; Hippolytos 192, 208, 281; Hippasos 364; Hodon 412; Homer
364, 401; Horapollon 170, 184, 218-20, 396; Horos 60, 198; Hyginus 193;
Hystaspes 134, 333.

lakobos 25; Iamblichos 12, 52!, 107, 162, 282f, 309, 330, 337; Irenaios 127; Isis
X02, 159, 182, 194ft', 245, 252, 327, 412.

Jacob 241; Jerome 299; Jews 47, 72, 155, 159, 170, 182, 232, 242, 252, 281, 330-2,
334f, 368, 407, 420; John of Antioch 54; John Archpriest 202, 249, 415; John of
Lykopolis 296; Josephos 106-8, 331; Julian, see under Rulers; Juvenal 92, 204.

Kallisthenes (pseudo) 327; Kedrenos 64, 141; Klaudianos 91, 101, 421; Kleanthcs
21; Klearchos 136; Kleopatra 66, 102, 177, 186, 240, 243, 250, 253ff, 288, 294,
3x8, 324, 328, 343, 351, 359, 421-3; Komarios 253, 260; Kratinos 24, 27; Kron-
Ammon 261; Kyprian 404; Kyrillos 269, 302.

Labeo 137; Lactantius 333; Leukippos 1, 4, 92, 101, 284, 403; Loukian 5if, 93b
129, 137, 304, 401; Lucan 396.

Macrobius 263, 267, 272; Mago 30, 396; Malalas 64; Manethos 32, 107, 162, 168,
305; Mani 148, 245, 285, 332^ Manilius 29f; Marcellus of Side413; Markos 104,
127, 411; Maria Jewess 73, 102, 140, 150, 239, 24off, 253, 343, 357, 366, 375,
409, 42of; Maria Kopt 66, 420; Marsanes 329; Martianus Capella 83; Melissos
365; Mesos 329; Methodikoi 204; Metrodoros 403; Montanos 414; Moses 84,
90, 107, 168, 170, 240, 243, 400.

Naasenes 422; Narsai 294, 425; Nazarean 66; Nechepso 32b 42, 60, 168, 176,
204, 206, 306, 397, 413; Neoplatonists 7, 10, 19, 22f, 48, 5if, 60, 62, 174, 304,
328f; Nepoualios 133; Nikomachos 127, 283; Nikotheos 325, 328-31, 334, 428;
Noah 241; Nonnos 274, 280, 422; Noumenios 35.

Olympiodoros 18,60,65, 68,141, 175, 177, 180, 164, 196, 240, 243, 301, 331, 356,
361-7, 372, 377, 386, 391, 411-3, 420; Onatos 66; Origen 35, 111, 272, 323!';
Orphics 82, 91, 134b 202, 240, 301, 377, 408, 424; Oseas 241; Ostanes 30b 33,
65b 99b 102-5, 107, H 7 , 13iff, 177 , l8z b t 9 6 » 20z > 2 43 > 2 5 tb 2 55 , 5 l 9 > 356, 373 .
408b 421; Ovid 80.

Pammenes 32, 65, 100, 102; Pamphilos 100, 133, 403!; Panodoros 54, 65; Paphnou
tia 343; Pappos 378; Parmenides 240, 364, 366; Paul of Aigina 406; Paul of Alc-x.

INDEX

396; Pausanias 82, no, 138; Pauseris 178; Pelahios 66, 360; Petasios 141, 240,
361, 420; Petesis 33, 371; Petosiris 22b 60, 92, 176, 413; Petronius 30, 82, 124;
Philolaos if, 9, 12; Philon of Alex. 174, 237b 334 , 37 G Philon of Byblos 304b
422; Philon Mech. 69; Philoponos 65, 385, 387, 432; Philostratos 219, 297;
Phrynichos 71; Pibechios 107, 154-6, 420; Pindar 24, 113, 128; Plato 5b 9,
i8f, 22f, 27, 51, 61, 63, 69, 9of, 93, 107, 116, 129, 136b 141, i6if, 211, 287, 330,
363, 371b 386, 390, 392-4, 400, 424, 432; Plinius 28, 30-2, 60, 66, 70, 83b 91-4,
97-9, 115, 124, 131-4, 203b 227, 229, 237, 279, 290, 375, 396, 401, 404; Plotinos
7, 22, 51b 329; Ploutarch 9, 33b 37, 39, 70, 95, 109, 197, 269, 281b 287, 422;
Poimandres 341; Polles 404; Porphyrios 32, 141, 153, 191b 3 z8 > 3 6i > 4 22 i
Poseidonios 136, 409; Proklos 6of; Psellos 83, 378, 4 ° 5 , 4 ° 8 1 Ptolemaios 32, 40,
6if, 68, 75, 384; Pythagoras 25, 30, 93, 97, 107, 109, 403; Pythagoreans 1, 9, it,
33, 51, 66, 83b 93, 127, 129, 282b 371b 377b 402, 407, 423b 43 !■

Quintos Smyrnaios 80.

Rufinus 73.

Salamo 414; Sanchouniathon 422; Seleukos 162; Seneca 29-31, 66, 383; Sergios
66, 372; Setvius 270; Sextus Emp. 6, 183; Simon Magus 300, 352, 405; Sokrates
(lapid.) 307, 324, 427; Sophar 157; Sophocles 71; Stephanos (alch.) 63, 66, 113,
174, 184, 274, 293b 319b 371-9, 4x5, 43°f; Stephanos of Byz. 96; Stoics 10,
20-3, 33b 4 8 b 51, 105, 116, 125, 129, 136, 157, 211, 270b 282b 328, 368, 395,
408b 432; Strabon 138, 207, 220, 424; Synesios (alch.) 65, 84, xoo, 104, 141, 245,
360b 366b 371, 43°; Synesios of Ptol. 360, 367, 430.

Tatian 133; Tertullian 38, 162, 179; Thales 364; Themistios 9; Theodoros 113, 275;
Theodotion 295, 380; Theodotos 299; Theophrastos 6f, i8f, 8 3 > 93 , 99 ! Theo-
phrastos (poet) 275, 379; Theopompos 136; Theosebeia 58, 337b 343 , 356;
Thessalos 203-8, 253, 416.

Valentinians 52, 184, 254, 411, 424; Valerius Soranus 283; Valgius Rufus 403;
Varro 283; Vettius Val. 32; Vitruvius 96b Virgil 29b

Xantbos 134, 408; Xenokrates 134, 404, 408, 424; Xenophanes 364, 395, 423.

Zcnobios 79, 113, 118, i2if; Zoroaster 100, 107b 122, 131-4, 136, 138, 148, 157,
196, 241, 317, 329, 560, 377, 395, 405, 409; Zarathustra 196, 408; Zosimos 33,
58b 65b 68f, 73b 8 6, 96b 157, 174b 177 , 179, i8 9 > ! 96 , 2° 2 , 216, 240b 243, 245b
249, 293, 319, 323ft, 343ft, 359-61, 365b 371b 377 f> 3 g 6, 3 88 , 39 1 , 4 * 3 , 4 2 °> 4 2 4 ,
428-31.

IV. ALCHEMIC AND OTHER ANCIENT WORKS

According to Energy (Zos.) 196; Acts of Kyriakos etc. 272; Acts of Propokios 54;
Acts of Thomas 272; Aeneid 270; Aetna 30; Aim of the Sage 41; Aphrodite 5;
Apocalypse of Hypastes 333; Apocalypse of Mithras 328; Archaic Book i8of;
Argonautika 202; Asclepius 43, 168; Assembly of Philosophers 375; Avesta
148, 196; Axiocbos 39.

Baphika 45, 100, 123, 396; Book of the Dead 273, 354b 422; Book of the Under¬
world 190; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 295.

INDEX

446

Calid and Morienus 252; Catechism of Baptism 295; Chaldaian Oracles 121, i } (,,
266, 284 397, 409, 411, 4 24f; Cheirokmeta 96f, 133, 323; Chemia, Book of’ 362 •
Chemical Papyri, 44, 61, 84, 99, 122-4, 226, 229, 518; Chronika (Afr.) 323
Chromka (Euseb.) 202, 323; Clementine Homilies 43; Commentary on Book <>l
Energy 366; Commentary on Letter Omega (Zos.) 325, 342, 348; Common
Intellect, On the, 301; Compendium of Gold 41; Constitution of Children, On
the, 5; Consulship of Stilicho (Claud.) 267^ Corinthians I, 295; Crown 155.

Daniel 26, 295, 395^ Dialogue of Komarios and Kleopatra 189, z^ff, 343, 35,;.
Didache 359; Dion (Synes.) 360; Dionysiaka 274; Discourse to Ammon 48
Discourse of Kleo., see Dialogue of Kom. and Kleo .; Domestic Chemistry of Moses
240; Dosikles and Rhodanthe 112.

Enchiridion 296, 425; Enoch, Book of, 43 f, 179, 196, 280; Enkomion by .. Dios
koros 367; Epinomis I3 6; Epistle of Clement, II, 299; Epistle of Eugnostos 300
.bxodus 237.

Fihrist 252; Final Account (Zos.) 334; Furnaces and Appliances 324, 328, 33.1,

G ^j ia p s 2 99 f i Genesis 46!, 179, 334; Genuine Discourse by Sophe 72; Geography
(Mrtsi) 108; Geponika 122, 243, 324; Golden Compendium 41; Goldmakiiig

* 8? ’ 2 , 53 VJ?° Spel Accofdin g to Egyptians 299; Gospel of Philip 282, 299
Gospel of Thomas 299.

Heptabiblon 159; Heptathongos 131; Hermeneumata 124; Hermes, Books of, 169;
Hermes to Tat, 174, 187, 197; History of Egypt (Man.) 168; History of Persia
(Dionys.) 134; Hymn to Demeter 80.

Immateriality 325; Instruments and Furnaces, see Furnaces; Isis ... to Horos 191.

Kalpasthana 281; Kestoi, 324; Key 158, 302; Keys 106; Keys of the Art 317- Ke\
of Greater Wisdom n 4; Keys of Magic 66; Khitab al-Fihrist 65, 372, see F ihrm
Khitab al-Habib 249; Khitab al-Uluf 173; Kleida I5 8, 411; Koiranides 156 180’
404, 4x3; Kore Kosmou 3 8f, 42, 44, 46, 71, i 49 , 160, I9 8, 3o 3 f, 396; Krater ,7 ,
Krates, book ot, 105, 109, 113, 144, 404; Kyranides 4of, 180.

Lectures (Steph.) 372-8; Letter of Demokritos 73, 101, 114, 116, 140, 155; Letlei
Kappa, On the, 430; Letter of Ostanes 141; Letter of Petosoris 32; Letters to the
Dead 164; Lexikon 306, 379; Lie Lover (Louk.) 93; Lime, On, 324; Lithika ,, ,
Little Key 178, 318, 427.

Maria the Kopt, Book of, 252; Memoranda, Demok., 33, 141; Metamorphose.
(Apul.) 293; Mithraic Liturgy 243; Moses, Book of, 72; Myriogenesis 176.

Natural Tinctures 336; Nature, On, 133, 325L

Odyssey 25 137, 226; Olympiodoros ... to Petasios 361; Opus Imperfectum 108;
Organon (or Sphere) of Demokritos 184; Organon of Hermes 184; Organon <»f
Petosiris 32; Orpheus, Oracle of, 301.

Paradise of Holy Fathers 226; Philosophoumena 272; Philosophy, on (Arist.) 13!.,
Physika and Mystika 100-2, 103, in, 140, 155, i 79 f, 183, 189, 333, 404; Pistis
Sophia 272; Plants (Theophr.) 96; Poimadres 44-6, I03f, 285, 341, 414; Potter's
Oracle 39; Power and Nature of the Chameleon 115; Prophecy of Zoroaster
196; Providence, On, 360; Pumpfcinification of Claudius 29; Pyramis 181.

INDEX

447

Red Stone, Book of, 66; Republic (Plato) 61, 287.

Sacred Book 181; Satire of Trades 73; Scripture in Seth’s Name 108; Septugint 155;
Sbawahid 152, 320; Shepherd of Hennas 109; Short Book of Hermes T. 180;
Sibylline Books 184; Sleep, On, 137; Sophe (Souphis), Book of, 121, 182, 413,
4x6, 420; 428; Sothis, Book of, 168; Souda, 96, 112, 323!, 360; Spangles of Gold
108; Species is Compound, That the, 375; Stone, On the, 66, 307; Sword of
Dardanos 107, n 9 , 126.

Tabula Sinaragdina 109, i85f; Talmud 238; Thessalians 333; Thirty Chapters
X 47 - 5 X; Thirty-five Chapters (Zos.) in; Thoth, Books of, i68f; Timaios, izf,
267; Treatise of Warning 315; Treatment of Magnesia 340; Twelve Chapters
142-4, 147 , i 5 2 -

Virtue (Zos.), On, 173, 343.

Wing, The, 72; Wisdom, Book of, 73; Wisdom of Solomon i5 9 f; Work of the
Sun 174.

Zohar 280.

V. OTHER NAMES

Abraham 73, 185, 241; Abraham, Aur., 226; Abramios 232; Abu Ma’shar 173;
Achab (Achaab) 175, i 9 5.f; Achaios 417; Achewa 291; Adam 109, 134, 173, 242f,
272, 300-2, 32.3, 330, 409, 420, 425f; Aetios 223-5; Agathoboulos, Aur., 225;
Agathokles 172; Agathon 223; Akas 169; Alexandras 225; Alunda 291; Ammo-
nios 221, 228; Amnael 71, 194-201, 327; Amons 36; Andreas 232; Andromachos
231; Anesas 33of; Annan loses, Aur., 232; Anniana 226; Apepi in, 163, 274;
Aphyngios 223; Apion 225f; Arabs 41, 76, 83, 88, 109, 121, 141, 148, 291, 381,
3 8 7 , 397 , 404 ; Aristagoras 297; Arnald of Villanova 244; Asfidus 318; Asurs
292; Atonga 291; Attila 361; Aurelios 231.

Bahya ben Asher 281; Baikatara 291; Baiia 291; Besa 369; Besamma 232; Blake
389; Boyle 381; Bryaxis 227; Buridan 383E

Campaspe 115; Charun 137; Claudianos 42; Corn lord 4; Crassus 23of.

Dalton 389; Damas 231; Damnameneus 79; Demarches 27; Delacroix 389; Deme-
trous 231; Dinon 136; Diomedes 77; Dionysios Petosarapis 167; Dioskoros
90, 232; Dyaks 280.

Edrisi 108; Elais 82; Eleazar 107; Enoch, see Henoch; Epeus 231; Epimethcus 243,
33 T i; Esnekenbo 165; Euangelos 2i9f; Evax 133; Eve 120, 243, 331, 425.

Felicissimus 35; Forbes 74.

Gainas 360; Gaius, see Caligula ; Galileo 3, n, 349, 385f, 388, 391, 393; ( isiynniiirl
88; Gebir 240, 406, 414; Georgios 226; Glaukos 88, 112; Gobrycs 39, 409,

Harthonis 231; Helmont, van, 84; Henoch io8f, 216, 315; Menus j 1(1 , Mrnildiin
203, 231; Herminos 226; Hierissa 418; Hipponax 81 : Moiucras Mi,ins it,,.
273; Hypatia 36of, 367.

448

INDEX

Iamos 113, 405; lannes 107, 170 (Iambres) 341; Iason 78; Ibn-Abi-Yakub An
Nadim 65C Ibn-Arfa’ Ra 108; Ibn Etrami 291; Ibn Shuhaid 312-4; Ibn Uinnil
113, 143, 186-8, 248, 254, 289^ Ibn-Wahs-Chijjah 253; Idris 109, 173,
lo 1x2; Ion 344, 406; Iosephos 225; Iourb 232; Isak, Aur., 253; Ischyrion 231,
Isidoros 233; 339, see Petesis (Index III).

Jesus 103, 134, 243, 359; Jews 47, 72, 155, 159, 170, 182, 232, 242, 252, 281.

Kallinikos 431; Kekule 277; Kephalas 223; Kitara 279; Kopres 221; Korneli(o)*
222; Krissa 222; Ktesiphon 418; Kyra 223; Kyranos 41.

Lavoisier 389; Liberalis 231; Longeinos 230; Longus Priscus, G., 220.

Makar 369; Makarios 226; Marsiiio Ficino 269; Mary 148, 242, 421; Medela 78.
425; Menas, Aur., 232; Menippos 137.

Nectanebo 327; Neilos 340; Neneferkaptah 27, 39; Neoptolemos 232; Newton /.
9, 11, 22, 383, 389!.

Ochos 134; Oino 82; Opos 223; Orion 82.

Paapis 231; Pamouthios, Aur. 226; Pandora 120, 243, 327, 331; Panouphis 253 .
Paous 231; Papa 53; Paracelsus 238, 387; Pasion 225; Paul, St. 170, 179, 55K,
Pelops 2 5; Peratai 192!, 28i;Peret 232; Petoousarapis 231; Petros 2 3 2; Phi b 225.
Philologia 83; Philoneikos 231; Ploutarchos 231; Polykarp 63!, 195; Polykleilos
81; Prajapati 345C 429; Priestley, J. 389; Proklos 307; Prometheus 78, 98, 197,
243, 327, 331, 428; Proshymnos 200; Protarchos 231; Ptolemaios 223.

Rhoio 82; Rhosyne 232.

Sabeinos 233; Sabians 108, 173, 313-21; Sambursky 21; Sappho Sarapias 251 ;
Sarapion 219, 231; Sarmates 225; Scaliger 65; Semthis 223; Senuti 73; Serenos
223; Seth I07f, 134, 405; Sethians 288, 294, 415, 424; Severianos 231; Severos,
Aur., 225; Side 82; Sopdet 241; Spermo 82; Staphylos 82; Statoetis 233.

'I'eiresias 289; Terathonis 231; Tesenouphis 233; Thaesion 221; Thamos 161,
Thrasyllus 92, 126; Turner 389; Tylon 99, 112.

Whyte, L. L. 392.

Zara 185; Zepi 273; Zoilos 231.

VI. PLACES

Abassos 78; Abdera 83, 92, 131, 136, 396, 402; Abonoteichos 25, 427; Abu Simnel
297; Abydos 339, 425; Afiom Kara Hissar 77; Africa 35, 153, 279, 290, 376;
Aigai 404; Aithiopia 93, 97, 172, 219, 307, 366; Akmonia 429; Akragas 2;
Alexandreia 28, 56, 66f, 78, 91, 100, 133, 155, 137, 159, 167, 200, 203-5, 219,
226C 232, 236f, 263, 269, 302, 311, 325, 331, 334, 367, 431; Amblada 224; Amo-
rion 78; Anazarbos 224; Andros 39; Ankyra 77C Antinopolis 232; Antioch 54,
213, 404; Aphrodisias 244, 404; Aphroditopolis 42; Apollonia 6; Appian Way
37, 203; Apsynthios 96; Apulia 78; Arabia 39, 97, 133; Arados 120; Archelais
231; Argos 112; Arkadia no, 193; Armenia 53, 97, 202, 240, 323; Armida 134,
408; Arsinoe 420, nome 230; Asia Minor 138, 141, 156, 214, 314; Assyria 2iof,
213, 215, 254, 278, 290, 330, 395, 419, 430.

INDEX 449

Babel, Tower of, 252; Babylon 98, 108, 137-9, 283, 409; Baktria 98; Beudos 77;
Bithynia 99, 136; Boiotia 82; Bousiris 172; Byblos 297, 404.

Caesarea 185, 188; Capua 237; Carthage 39, 33, 153; Caucasus 78, 215; Chaldaia,
37, 72, 330, 396, 408, 415, 430; China 78, 85-9, 228, 280, 291b, 311, 318, 402, 418,
430; Chios 71, 420; Chota Nagpur 292; Chrysapha 75, 78; Colonia Antiocheia
77; Constantinople 224; Corinth 179, 236C Crete 40, 66; Cypros 76, 91, 226, 417.

F.dessa 66; Edfu 71, 163, 202, 427; Egypt 24, 27, 3if, 37, 39C 42, 46-9, 53C 56, 58f, n

70-4, 86, 93, 102, 104, 109, in, i22f, 126, 128, 134, i4of, i45f, 148, lyof, 134,

157C 162, 167, 172, 176, i82f, 184, 189, 199, 201-3, 2 °5> 20 9> 22 7> 2 3°> 2 34~6,

240C 254, 261, 267C 273, 278, 281, 286f, 293, 301, 304, 313, 330, 335f, 339, 334,

357, 36if, 366, 371, 405, 407, 415-7, 430; Elephantine 98, 202, 304, 310; Eleusis ig

8of, 135, 199, 383: in Egypt 167; Emmaos 203, 323; Emir Dagh 77; Ephesos 19, //;

81, 135; Epidauros 297; Esna 108; Euagria 202; Euboia 82; Eumemeria 220; 1

Euphrates 313.

Fayum, 229, 233. O

Galatia 226; Gaza 62; Gerasa 127; Great Tarouthinos 226.

Harran 108, 157, 173, 313-21, 356; Hebron 155; Heliopolis 39C 70, 168, 217, 314,
431; Herakleides Div. 233; Herakleopolis 202; Hermopolis 165, 174, 197, 217,
334; Hieropolis 77, 272, 314, 409; Hierocaesareum 134, 138; Hormanouthi 71,
202; Hypaipa 134, 138.

Ida 79,401; India 93, 97, 101, 143, 150, 189, 226, 228, 292, 545; Ios 39; Ismailia 229;
Italy 1, 32, 117.

Japan 112; Jerusalem 285, 330.

Kanopos 73, 199; Kappadokia 97, I38f, 226; Karanis 221; Kamak 46, 4Sf, 67;
Kilikia 28, 84, 98, 224; Klaros 160; Knidos 136; Koile Syria 223; IColophon 364;
Kyme 39.

Larissa 99, 403; Leukas 83f, 402; Libanos, Mtns., 141; Lydia 134, 138, 143, 203!,
213, 329, 361; Lykia 141; Lykopolis 202, 296.

Mannheim 36F; Massilia 37; Medinet Habu 47, 163; Mekone 77f; Melos 401;
Memphis 27, 39, 91, 163, zo2f, 2i6f, 404, 411, 416; Mendes 31, 44, 67, 236^ 303;
Merse 97; Mesopotamia 25, 86f, 138, 141, 147, 173, 210, 213-5, 2 3 ®= 2 7 *b 2 8 i, 29 °>
2 93, 313, 321, 395, 403; Miletos 93, 134; Mysia 97.

Naasenes, 272, 299b; Nashona 291; Neilopolis 230; Nikaia 54; Nikosia 76; Nile
235, 235, 275, 286, 407; Nyasaland 291.

Oasis 232f; Olympos 51, 296; (Lykia) 141; Ophites 111, 272; Opis 412; Ostia 35C
271; Oxyrhynchos 67, 139, 224, 231-3, 237, (nome) 37.

Paestum 81; Paktolos 213; Palestine 203, 226; Palmyra 339; Panchaia 39; Pannonia
55; Panopolis 57, 108, 167, 220, 274, 328, 338f, 340, 343, 412, 418; Parthia 228,
230; Persia 26f, 34, 72C 86-9, 97f, 122, 132, 136C 143, 150, 154, 156-8, 184C 215,
242, 252, 313C 330, 376C 379, 396,403, 405, 409, 412, 430; Petra 64; Pheneos no;
Philadelphia (Lydia) 361; Philai 361; Phoboou 231; Phoinikia 73, 106, 185, 267,
272, 297, 304; Phrygia 226, 272, 331; Piribeyli 77; Pisidia 224; Pompeii 101, 221,
242, 293; Pondicherry 228; Pontos 96, 117, 226; Porte Maggiore 84; Prokonnesos
32; Prymnessos 77; Psbothis 232f; Ptolemais 3if; 339 (Libya).

450

INDEX

Red Sea 39, 93, 229; Rba 84; Rhodes 136, 226, 406; Rome 56, 38, 55I', 84, 109, 263.
281.

St Gall 107; Sais 32, 49, 330, 354; Samara 316; Samos 71; Santa Prisca 36; Saqqai.i
167; Sardeis 134, 213; Sekneptynis 231, 233; Seplasia 237; Skythia 182, 226, 401 ,
Sicily 2, 39, 108; Side 82; Sinai 219, 229, 241; Sinopis 226; Siriad 108; Siwa 312 ,
Soknopaiou Nesos 230; Soloi 136; Spain 143, 226; Synnada 77; Syrakousa 13!);
Syria 40, 64, 98, 119, 122, 140-2, 157, 172, 180, 196, 215, 226, 228, 253, 272, 29.1,
321,323,358,370,379,397,404,406,413,418.

Takona 223; Tanganyika 291; Tanis 188; Tarouthinou Epoikion 231; Tarsos 28;
Tauros 141; Teis 225; Teos 93; Thebaid 167, 202; Thebes 46b, 123, 161, 205,
207, 309, 334, 339f, 361, 411, 413, 418; Thessalonika 79; Thrace 91, 402; Tigris
40; Trapezoutik Coast 40; Troizen 297; Tuscany 79; Tuthia 91.

Virapatnam 228, 418.

Zakynthos 85; Zante 208.

VII. SUBJECTS

Advocate 250!; Alum 2326, 235, 419; Ants 28, 366; Antimimos 333!, 428; Appli¬
ances, 243ff, 324^ 332, 334, 341, 366; Aramaic 133, 138, 370, 420; Arians 22.1;
Astrology 26f, 32, 34, 38f, 6if, 92, 108, 124^ 132, 159, 166, 173, 175, 201, 272,
279, 284, 309f, 313, 332, 337, 379, 396, 404, 411, 422, 427, see also Fatality; Atoms
13, 18, 92, 101, 362, 390, 432.

Baptism 292, 380, 407; Bankers 51, 225, 233; Barber 346-50, 355; Black 70I', 74,
n6f, 228, 279, 282, 314, 3i6f; Bythos 184, 414, 416.

Caduceus 188-93, 3°9> 4 * 4 , 4 2 7J Calendar 60, 162; Camels, 233, 419; Capricorn 30,
125; Cerberus, 263; Chameleon 114-6, 403; Christians 56, 62-4, 91, io8f, 162,
174, 225, 240, 286, 285!', 299, 323, 3 5 8f, 366-71, 378-80, 382, 405,412, 421; Circus
factions 376; Colour i8f, 29, 31, 33f, 38, 49, 51, 63, 67, 84, 93, ioof, 105, 111 4,
121-4, i38f, 148, 178, 182-4, 187, 214-6, 218, 227-31, 236, 238, 241, 246-8, 252,
2 55 > 2 75 - 7 > 3 i6 - 8 > 337 . 361, 373 . 3 8 9 f > 395 . 4 ° 6 f, 4 ° 9 > 4 * 3 . 4 i 8 f> 4 i 2 , 4 2 71 Cooking
47, 49, 64, 184, 213, 238, 249, 341, 396; Copper 59C 84, 99, hi, 118, 146, 156,
178, 183, 213, 217, 219, 241, 297, 3i4f, 319^ 324, 349, 404, 406, 413, 417, 427;
Cosmogonies 1-3, 43-9, 88, 217, 238, 255, 283C 288, 290, 304, 362-5; Counter
feiting 54-60, 227, Spirit 58, 333; Crab 35, 306; Craft Process 12, 15, 21, 151,
184, 197, 2i2ff, 391, 417-20; Crocodile 172, 235, 262, 357, 420, 423, 425; Cupella
tion, 29, 214.

Demiurge 12,15, 45, 160, 177, igy£, 295, 310, 335, 416, 422; Dioiketes 233; Diplosis
240, 425; Divination 207^ Double 1 52f, 209, 217, 302; Dragon 27, 109, m, 144,
146-8, 156, 163, 272-7, 311.

Egg 121, 152, 186, 235, 261, 341, 356, 362, 373, 413, 424; Eidola 53, 95, 125, 264,
302, 407; Elements 2, 13, 17, 20, 27, 34, 36, 48, 127-9, I 5 °. I 75 > i8 3 > 2 37 > 2 57 >
33 1 . 337 . 361. 364-8. 377.' Embryos 29of; Epistrategos 230.

Fallen Angels 38, 43f, 179, 196, 199; Fatality 157, 242^ 266, 285, 325-31, 335-8,
428; Femaleness 298-300; Fermentation 30,63,184,23 8f, 251, 398,401; Fire 13-15,
17-21, 30, 36, 45f, 48, 52f, 61, 64, 73, 93, 98 121, I35f, I38f, 142, I48f, 170, 178,
i86f, i88f, 208, 228, 257, 259, 275, 279, 286, 289, 295, 309, 315, 317C 361, 366C
375 . 395 . 4 ° 5 . 4 ° 9 . 4 22 f-

451

Gems 49, 226-8, 262, 297, 312, 396, 405, 417, 422; Gladiator sweat 237; Glass 63,
213, 215, 232, 341; Glazes 216, 417; Gold 14, 29, 24-30, 33, 35, 41, 52, 58-61,
63C 65, 67, 69, 71, 76, 87, 100, 104-6, 135, 177^ 181-3, 193, 202, 2i3ff, 218f,
240, 250, 253, 261, 268, 274, 279, 297^ 314, 318, 324, 325, 349, 355, 371, 383,
395 f. 43 1 5 Greek Fire 84f, 143, 370, 385, 431; Gunpowder 384f.

Haloa 81; Haoma 88f; Heptathongos 408, 428; Herma 32i;FIermai 168; Hexis 21-3;
Hydreion 201; Hymen 284, 424.

Ibis 1646, 170, 172, 312; Initiation 142, 14761, 198-200, 211, 228, 293, 315; Isthmian
Games 79.

Kerotakis 186, 243, 246, 248, 293; Kiaudianos 275; Kohl 236; Kosmokrator 346,
422; Krater 294, 412; Kundalini igof; Kykeon 80.

Laboratory 353F; Laccha 101; Ladder 36, 397; Letters, 39, 127-9, 160-2, 172, 184,
3 2 3 > 33 1 . 4 ° 7 t 4*71 Lion 32, 36, 1456, 262f, 3o6f, 311, 313, 406, 422, 427; Lists of
Alchemists 9of; Lynx 279.

Mages 36f, 39, 83, 97, 99, 100, 108, 125, i3if, 134-6, 1386, 333, 400, 403, 405, 409,
411, 415; Magnet 105, 1x8; Marriages (alchemical magical) 106, 171, 188, 249,
256, 261, 285, 287-90, 294, 351, 375, 404, see also Womb; Martyr 636, 295;
Mastaria 293^ Mercury 28, 33, 66, 121, 156, 179, 186, 195, 245, 315, 318, 367,
396; Metallurgy 68-70, 72f, 88f, 124, 170, 401, 415, 425; Metal-men 179, 181,
274, 296f, 346ff; Metals 14, I7f, 26, 28, 35, 59, 88, 112, 153, 176^ 181, 210, 216-8,
2 43 “ 7 . 26 7 f, 2 75 ~ 7 . 3 I 9 . 3 22 i Microcosm 113, 175, 185-7, 198, 211, 285, 324, 374,
409. 413, 415; Minerals 49f, 84, 178, 181, 366; Miners 395; Misy 59, 232, 419;
Mithraism 138, 147, 199, 262, 271, 324, 349, 406, see also Mithras (Index I);
Mixture 18, 22, 42, 60, 149, 249, 259; Mole 179, 181; Moon 35, 42, 80, 101, 146,
156, 163, 170, 176, 185-8, 209, 264, 277, 28if, 284, 314^ 325, 408, 413.

Nadi i9of; Natron 63, 178.

Ouroboros 192, 195, 260-77, 2 9 °. 2 94 . joi, 305^ 341, 362, 380, 423.

Pankrator 270-2; Pearl 272, 376; Peewit 180; Pennyroyal 8of; Perfumes 15, 184,
22 °> 2 34 ~ 8 . 419; Persecution 52-7; Phallus 200, 415; Phoenix 64, 172, 265, 355,
413, 422; Physis 21, 23, 2656, 267, 374; Plants 74ff, 87, 93, 101, ii2f, ii7f, 133,
160, 204-11, 234, 260, 402f, 408, 416, 421; Pneuma 20-3, 42, 45, 48f, 52, 61, 64,
112, 116, 120, 125, 136, 149, 157, 174, 178, 183, 191-3, 206, 232, 258, 264^ 269!,
2 94 . 373 . 3 g 6, 395, 4 * 3 . 4 2 °; Pnuematikoi 104; Poppy 72ff, 4oof; Poverty 121,

3 17. 4°7> 4 I 3, 428; Prefect 221, 230, 233; Procurator 233.

Quality 5, 2if, 116, 387-9, 392.

Record Office 220; Rhubarb 84, 89, 117; Romantic Movement 389; Rosetta Stone
i66f.

Saffron 84, 413, 418; Sal Ammoniac 152, 356, 430; Secrecy 141-3, 213; Selinon 79;
Sevens, 34-6, 436, 126-9, 131. 139, i47f, 155E, 159, i6of, 169, I7if, 262, 267, 325,
33 2 f, 349, 397; Sex in stones, etc., 278®, 361, 423, see also Womb; Sheep 221;
Slavery 8-10, 72, 385; Statue I4f, 26, 63, 65, 138, 221, 227^ 296, 307, 352, 377;
Stelai 39-43, 102-4, 2 4 2 > 264, 33°, 366, 405, 407, 411, 413; Sulphuretted Hydrogen
iz2; Sun, 32, 35, 37f, 80, 97,120,146, 156,163, 170,179,181,183,185-8,191, 200,
203, 208f, 243, 265, 268f, 273, 282, 284, 302f, 308, 31 of, 313, 352, 377, 408, 414;
Sympathy 13, 2if, 100, 175, 208, 397, 404.

45 *

INDEX

Tattooing I98f, 415; Temple as Cosmos 349, 383, 409; Textiles 220, 223, 230!, 239;
Thesmophoria 81; Time 139, 269!, 395, 422, see also Aion (Index 1 ); Triadic
Formula 16, 103, xi2f, 117, 148, 154, 177, 183, 303, 327^ 373, 381, 409.

Up-and-Down 178, 180, 186-93, x 9 8 . 2 °9> 2 4 8 £ 254b, 2 57, 294, 346-

Violet ii2f, 406; Veteran 220.

Woad 229; Womb 197, 200, 243, 255^ 259, 278ft', 284, 288-90, 294, 300, 305, 345,
352, 396, 423-6.

Yu 280.

Zervanism 136; Zodiac 35, 97, 139, 175, 201, 327, 397.

THE AUTHOR

Jack Lindsay was born in Victoria,
Australia, in 1900 and studied at Brisbane
Grammar School and Queensland Univer¬
sity. He obtained a First Class Honours
degree in Classics and drew on the ancient
Greek world for writing poetry and
historical novels. During the war he
served first with the Signals Corps and then
at the War Office.

The son of Norman Lindsay, he has
written more than sixty books, including
such studies as Leisure and Pleasure in
Roman Egypt, Civil War in England and
Arthur and his Times. Among his success¬
ful translations are the Trojan War plays
by Euripides. He lives in Castle Heding-
ham, Essex, with his wife and two child¬
ren.

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